DVC's fourth dam at #Panchet in Dhanbad district, near its border with Purulia (West Bengal) was built across the Damodar river known as the ‘sorrow of Bengal.' Not only was this Rs.19 crore dam DVC's biggest until then; its inauguration on December 6, 1959 had been graced by Prime Minister Nehru himself. After his own fashion, Nehru had insisted that 15-year-old Budhni Mejhan, a worker on the site, press the button at the power station to signal the start of operations. However, when Budhni returned to her village, Karbona, the village elders told her that by garlanding Nehru at the function she had in effect married him. Since the Prime Minister was not a Santhal, she was no longer a part of the community. She was told to leave the village. The inflexibility of the community ensured that the excommunication was complete. The youngster was given shelter by a resident of Panchet, Sudhir Dutta, from whom it was said she had a daughter, born to a destiny of exile like her mother. In 1962, Budhni was fired from her job at DVC and reduced to doing odd jobs. In the 1980s, she travelled to Delhi. She met the then Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi, grandson of the Prime Minister she had garlanded, with a request: she wanted to be reinstated at DVC. The last trace of Budhni was found in a 2001 news report uploaded on the website www.ambedkar.org. Headlined ‘Tribal ‘ wife' of Nehru is outcast, driven to poverty' it recounted these details of Budhni's life. Stating that the 58-year-old was working at DVC, the report quoted Budhni as saying, “I wish they would allow me to go back to Karbona.” Budhni's fate almost seemed a figment of one's imagination. Her story sank in the media, just like the Santhal villages and historic old temples which got submerged by the waters of the Damodar river impounded by the Panchet dam. (Tribals constituted 56.46 per cent of the population displaced by the Panchet and Maithon dams, says a 1999 paper on ‘Dams, Displacement, Policy and Law in India,' authored by Harsh Mander, Ravi Hemadri and Vijay Nagaraj for the World Commission on Dams.) ~ #chitrapadmanabhan The Hindu, Feb 2021 #panchetdam #damodarriver #dam #riverdam #riverdams #tribal (at Purulia Panchet Dam) https://www.instagram.com/p/ChpjR_gPBw6/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=