How Purvideen Khera got its road

Who'd have imagined that a bunch of poor, illiterate women in a slum would be able to achieve this?

There was a time when families of eligible girls rejected wedding proposals from families belonging to Purvideen Khera, a huge denotified urban settlement in Lucknow. There was something that this slum lacked, which many of Lucknow’s other 700-plus slums had -- a road. Ambulances, school vans and trucks carrying vital goods would have to stop outside the slum that sprawls over a kilometer on both sides of the Haider canal. The single alley inside the slum was so narrow that if someone even parked a two-wheeler there, another couldn’t pass. It seemed difficult to imagine this as I, with community