Editor,
Arunachalam Muruganantham is a real-life hero. He invented a low-cost sanitary pad-making machine. His mini-machines can manufacture sanitary pads for less than a third of the cost of commercial pads. Arunachalam generated awareness in rural areas about the need for hygienic practices regarding menstruation. His machine-made cost-effective sanitary napkins not only improved women’s health but also gave women an opportunity to earn by selling those napkins.
A Bollywood film titled ‘Pad Man’ was made on his life. It was reported that the actor who did the role of Arunachalam earned Rs 40 crore for acting in that film.
Now, we will shift our focus from one to a dozen real-life heroes. When 41 labourers were trapped behind a 57m-thick barrier of debris that defeated all technology-based efforts to drill beyond 45m, the 12 rat-hole miners rescued them from the tunnel in Uttarakhand’s Uttarkashi in November last year. They did it by opening up the unyielding mountain debris by their courage, skill, patience, endurance and perseverance. Their heroic act freed the trapped workers after their 16-day ordeal inside the tunnel when the whole world was on tenterhooks for the results of the rescue operation.
The 12 rat-hole miners – Munna Qureshi, Monu Kumar, Jatin, Nasir Khan, Feroze Qureshi, Debender Kumar, Saurabh, Wakeel Hassan, Irshad Ansari, Ankur, Naseem Malik and Rashid Ansari – worked at a stretch for nearly 24 hours, squatting inside a narrow steel pipe of 800mm diameter on their toes, crouching as low as possible with their knees folded to clear the debris with handheld tools to rescue the trapped workers.
A ‘Lagaan’-like movie can be made on this story. I say ‘Lagaan’-like because of the similarities between the number of heroes in Lagaan and in the tunnel rescue. In ‘Lagaan’, apart from the main hero who acted in the leading role of a cricket team captain, there were other 10 actors who played in the roles of other members of the 11 member cricket team. It is reported that the leading actor of that movie now charges Rs 100 to 150 crore for his films besides taking 70 percent of the profit.
We can make a rough guess at how many crores the actors might charge to act in a film on the successful rescue operation at the Silkyara Bend-Barkot tunnel in Uttarkashi. But there are no prizes for guessing how much each of the rat-hole miners got after saving real human lives and making the seemingly impossible become possible.
Each of the rescue workers was awarded Rs 50,000. Besides this, nothing more – no permanent employment – no house was given or promised. Wakeel Hassan, proprietor of the Delhi-based agency that provided 12 rat-hole miners for the rescue operation, said, “We have decided not to cash the cheques for Rs 50,000 that Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami handed to each of us at a function in Dehradun on Thursday. I had reacted to him about the paltry sum given to us and he said he would think about it. We are awaiting his decision.”
Had they entertained people by saving lives in a movie they would have been rich by now. Or if they could rescue an IPL team from a certain defeat to victory, they would have earned a bomb in the next round of IPL player auction. In the IPL player auction for 2024, one player got Rs 24 crore 75 lakhs, another Rs 20 crore 50 lakhs, yet another got Rs 14 crore, and so on.
This is called value judgment. While entertaining people with a movie or a cricket match deserves crores of rupees, saving human lives cannot be rewarded with more than thousands. Alas, people cannot be entertained by the act of real heroes who save real lives. So, let people wait until a movie is made on the tunnel rescue mission. Certainly that movie on the Herculean task of rescuing 41 reel lives by 12 actors would be a real thriller and worth spending money for.
Though the real mission failed to fetch more than thousands, the actors in the movie would certainly be honoured with crores for giving the audience goose pimples. I really admire actors and players for their painstaking endeavours to translate their potential into reality. But I feel terribly sad about how real-life heroes are being treated.
Sujit De,
Kolkata