At 75, Kishun Yadav is the oldest bachelor in Badwan Khurd. He kept waiting for a girl for much of his life and only gave up recently. But he didn’t want the other 150 bachelors in his village—between 25 and 70 years—to go his way so he told them they would have to move heaven and earth if they were to bring home a wife. And that’s what the villagers of Badwan Khurd and its twin village, Badwan Kalan, have been doing since January this year.

The twin villages, 40 km from the district headquarters of Bhabhua and 240 km from Patna, remain cut off from development by the Adhaura Hills, part of the Kaimur hills. They are infamously known as the “villages of bachelors and spinsters” because marriage proposals are hard to come by. But now, after years of waiting for the government to build them a road that will make their village more accessible, the villagers have taken it upon themselves to cut a six km road through the hills. They have already made a workable road on the Adhaura hills for about three-and-a-half km. They now have the arduous task of carving a road downhill.

After a smooth ride till Bhagwanpur police station—under which the twin villages fall—it is another five-km bumpy ride till Jaitpur village. That’s where the road ends and vehicles sputter and stop. After a one km walk to the Adhaura foothills, the journey to Badwan Khurd and Badwan Kalan starts. It’s a steep climb up the rock stairs. The villagers have posted Chandraman Singh Yadav, Mohan Singh Yadav, Rajendra Singh and Shailesh to cheer on wobbly climbers like us. Several missteps and some near-falls later, the sound of chisels and spades striking on hard rock starts ringing in. Two hundred yards later, we see the men and women, over 70 of them, carving their destiny—cutting stones, moving huge boulders and leveling the road.

Most of them are between 20 and 40—all “eligible bachelors”, as someone in the group said. Village elders Indra Kharwar and Bansi Yadav—they are bachelors too—cheer the men at work. Over a dozen women play supporting roles. The scorching sun does nothing to beat down their spirits.

Dinanath Yadav, a 25-year-old bachelor, says, “We are not ashamed to say that we want roads if we ever hope to get married. And we are not waiting for the government anymore.” He says once the road is ready, the villages will have better access to health and education, besides basic ration. Dinanath then shares his “secret dream”—of riding a motorcycle to the village someday. “There will be nothing like getting my wife here on the pillion seat,” he says.

Ram Dayal Singh, the former sarpanch of Badwan Kurd, says Bhabhua MLA Ramchandra Singh Yadav betrayed them. “During the 2005 Assembly election campaign, he vowed not to get married till a road was built here. But he is now a married man and says he is not a fool to remain unmarried for the people of Badwan,” says Singh.

Four km away from the construction site, the twin villages rise in the distance. The villagers have to travel 40 km to get to Bhabhua in the north and Chenari to the east. Adhuara, to the south of the villages, is 30 km away. The hills frame the villages in the west.

The two Badwans—with a mix of Yadavs, Musahars and tribals—have over 3,500 people with 1,200 votes. Chandrama Singh Yadav, a social worker in the village, says the road they were building will pass through the Kaimur wildlife sanctuary and they were yet to get permission from the forest department. “The chief conservator of forests, B.N. Jha, told me there were special provisions to allow roads through sanctuaries,” says Yadav.

Kalaunji Devi’s son ran fever for three days and died before he could be taken to the hospital in Bhabhua, 40 km away. She says she knows the road won’t bring back her dead son but hopes there won’t be any such deaths.

Akhilesh, another bachelor, says the villagers aren’t looking for any sympathy from the politicians. “Our leaders better remember that there are 103 villages in the hills of Kaimur,” he says. Sasaram constituency, under which both the Badwans fall, is represented by Congress’s Meira Kumar in the present Lok Sabha.

Guljari Devi of Burdwan Khurd says, “Nobody talks about our unmarried daughters. The two villages have over 60 unmarried girls who are at least 30 years old.”

The twin villages share a school till the eighth class. Only about two per cent of the students continue their high school education by scaling the hills to go to schools either in Adhaura or Bhabhua on the other side. The villages have 10 hand-pumps; five of them are dry. The villagers own land—between 7,000 sq ft to five acres per person. They own cows and buffaloes too but cannot go to the plains everyday to sell milk. They make khoya and go to the market once in 10 days to sell it.

Badwan sarpanch Ramnath Singh Chero says: “We have now reluctantly started marriages between the two Badwans. Three such marriages took place in the last three years. We hope the road will be our route to marriage.”