We all might have heard our grandparents or parents saying, ‘if you do good for others, you get good for yourself’. And not so surprisingly it has turned true for many including, 45-year-old, Tripura resident Swapan Debbarma, who in June this year saved lives of thousand people by jumping off in front of a speeding train that would have met with an accident if not stopped. The incident happened in at Dhalai district, which is 83 Km from Agartala. In order to facilitate Debbarma for his bravery, Tripura’s BJP-IPFT government on Wednesday decided to award him with a job.
According to The Indian Express, Debbarma has been recruited as a Group-D employee in the Department of Youth Affairs and Sports as a sign of gratitude to the ‘God of the woods’. The Education Minister and cabinet spokesperson Ratan Lal Nath said that the cabinet ministers have decided to take the step and they have also decided to take care of his (Debbarma) daughter’s education. He said, “We shall recruit Swapan Debbarma as a Group D employee in the Department of Youth Affairs and Sports. His daughter accompanied him during his courageous feat to stop a speeding train from a certain disaster. Our government will bear all expenses for his daughter’s education.”
On June 15 2018, Debbarma and his teenage daughter, Somati, who come from a poverty-stricken tribal family, residing in Dhanchara village in northern Tripura, became local heroes after saving the lives of over 2,000 passengers of the train travelling from Agartala towards Dharmanagar.
What happened on that day
On the day of the incident, the father and daughter were climbing down from Atharamura hill in Dhalai district when they saw a passenger train approaching towards a point where there was no railway track. According to the reports, a huge landslide followed by heavy rains had affected the railway track in the area.
Debbarma immediately saw this and jumped onto the tracks. He took off his shirt and waved it vigorously in front of a coming train, hoping that the driver of the train would notice him. Somali, his daughter too joined her father in his efforts. Fortunately, the train driver saw Debbarma waving and stopped the train, which averted a tragedy to happen.
“If we had not spotted the signal and stopped the train, it could have met with a severe accident,” Sonu Kumar Mandal, the driver of the train, had told the media.
After the incident, many appreciated Debbarma presence of mind and his bravery act. The Tripura Health Science and Technology Minister, Sudip Roy Barman, also brought up this incident in the Zero hour of the Tripura Assembly and urged the Chief Minister Biplab Kumar Deb and the House to extend a befitting reward to the two of them. He said that Swapan and Somati, come from a tribal family of six, and somehow try and make ends meet by selling forest produce like firewood and bamboo at the local market.
Chief Minister, Biplab Kumar Deb, had told the house that his government would recommend their names to the central Ministry of Railways for financial assistance and reward. Meanwhile, the Northeast Frontier Railway had also promised a reward to Swapan.
The Logical Indian salutes the Father-daughter duo, who averted a big train accident due to which many lives may have lost. If not for their bravery and presence of mind, hundreds of passengers could have lost their lives.
