BARNALA: With only a small temporary roof made from a piece of cloth, and that too on someone else’s land, Puja Rani went on to win a gold medal in the National Kickboxing Championship. Now that roof was snatched, bur Rani was still determined to represent Punjab and win more such laurels for the state. The small hutment in a slum, where she was born, was razed to the ground by the Barnala Improvement Trust on Friday. Puja’s family, along with 60 other families, lived in jhuggis on land owned by the Improvement Trust for decades.20-year-old Puja Rani, while representing Punjab, won a gold medal in the under 65 kg event at the National Kickboxing Championship at Ranchi in Jharkhand, held from Aug 23 to 27, 2023. Again in 2025, she won a silver medal in the national championship held at Raipur, Chhattisgarh, from July 16 to 20, 2025. In between, she won many medals at district and state level without any resources at hand and with no formal training.Presently studying in the 1st year of a Bachelor of Arts at a private college in Barnala, Puja, upon winning the gold and silver medals, put them on a small branch of a small tree near her jhuggi. This was highly admired by all 60 families living in hutments. Along with her hutment, that small tree was uprooted too, which brought tears to her eyes for a while. However, she immediately wiped her tears and joined other families in unsuccessfully trying to stop the men with the bulldozer (called peela panja in local parlance).“I was in a govt senior secondary school in Barnala when, with self-training of 3 years, I was selected for the national championship, and my jhuggi mates prayed for me. With their prayers, I returned with a gold medal around my neck, with a warm welcome from jhuggi dwellers, but not from the administration. It was repeated in 2025 when I won a silver medal, as I failed to participate in 2024 due to illness. I had the solace of a small roof, which was suddenly snatched on Friday,” said Puja, speaking to TOI.“We were promised an alternate place as we lived here for decades and have voter and Aadhar cards in our names, and even the municipal council put numbers on the hutments. However, as the Improvement Trust wanted to commercially exploit the costly land, they forgot the promise to provide alternate land and made us roofless,” said Punjab and many others.Social activist Bhan Singh Jassi Pedhni, who ran a school in the slum for the children of saperas, said, “The authorities should have given an alternate place if they needed this land. The jhuggis were demolished, making families roofless in the chilly weather. The govt claims to provide facilities to budding sportspersons, but here even a roof was snatched from a national champ.”Barnala Improvement Trust Executive Officer Rajesh Kumar said, “It was trust land. Some persons encroached upon it illegally, and the trust got it vacated. The trust has some commercial and residential plans for the land.”Barnala Congress, led by MLA Kuldeep Singh Dhillon, slammed the Improvement Trust for its action. They demanded that the administration provide an alternate place to those displaced. MSID:: 127817474 413 |
