How this 43-year-old sarpanch made his village in UP a smart one

Dilip Kumar Tripathi, the village head of Hasudi Ausanpur in Bhanwapur Block of Sidharth Nagar district of Uttar Pradesh was elected as the Panchayet head in 2015.

Spirit and determination can make one tide over unthinkable hurdles and this story of a 43-year-old sarpanch of a village in Uttar Pradesh is a perfect example of that.

Dilip Kumar Tripathi undertook the challenge to transform the village, a task that took him six years to complete. (Twitter)

Dilip Kumar Tripathi, the village head of Hasudi Ausanpur in Bhanwapur Block of Sidharth Nagar district of Uttar Pradesh was elected as the Panchayet head in 2015. At that time the small village, situated about 200 km from Lucknow, was nothing more than a nondescript village. Tripathi undertook the challenge to transform the village, a task that took him six years to complete. The once small village with crumbling roads and poor infrastructure now enjoys free Wifi, functional CCTV cameras around the area, digital school classrooms and toilets in every household.

“I got the village when everything was in shambles. It was hard to initiate things. Our district comes in the top 100 backward districts of the country. It is situated in very interior part and lacked on all fronts,” Tripathi told Life Beyond Numbers.

With hard work, he was successful in bringing about several changes in the village including GIS mapping of the whole area along with an updated database of each family residing there. Additionally, each house of the village has been painted pink to give visitors a visual treat. Thanks to this makeover, it is hard to differentiate between this once unknown village and a proper town.

Tripathi even came forward to construct a mini hospital with the money left behind by his late mother. “Earlier, people never knew that a village head could get so much work done. Now our village is fully developed to some extent. I am now focusing on providing job opportunities to the villagers in the village itself so that the migration of workforce stops and the village becomes a self-dependent model,” Tripathi added.