Groom Builds Road For Village From Saved Wedding Funds: Gets Married In Simple Ceremony

In India, we have seen people spend a fortune on their weddings. Some Indian weddings in the past have been so grand that they have attracted attention from international media too. However, one man from Maharashtra is in the news after he decided to skip a lavish wedding and instead spend the wedding fund on building a farm road for villagers.

Shrikant Ekude, a young man from Susa village in Warora tehsil of Chandrapur district of Maharashtra, got married to Anjali on April 28 this year. Shrikant, who is a postgraduate in Agriculture, went for a very simple ceremony called the ‘Satyashodhak’ model, advocated by social reformer Jyotirao Phule. What is Satyashodhak? Well, as per the system, no rituals are performed at the wedding ceremony. The bride and groom only take vows of marriage with the Creator of the universe as the witness.

Not only did they go for a simple ceremony, they also celebrated the occasion by planting around 90 saplings instead of accepting traditional gifts from friends and relatives.

While preparations for the wedding started, Shrikant had requested his family and relatives to avoid the traditional way of spending money on ceremonies and feasts. After convincing them, Shrikant managed to collect Rs 50,000 as his wedding fund and utilized the money to actually build a farm road nearly 600 metres long for the villagers. Using this road, they can now access their fields more easily.

Shrikant said,

The path from our village to the fields would become very bad during the monsoon. It was nearly impossible for people to access their agricultural fields. With the help of locals and the gram panchayat, we built the road.

Shrikant said that he had requested his friends and relatives not to spend money on gifts, utensils, furniture, and appliances for his wedding. Shrikant, who is also a successful farmer, knows the importance of farmers and agriculture and understands the need for proper access roads to farmland. Shrikant harvests Chilli and is also producing Chilli paste, packaged and marketed across the state under the name Seetai, after his late grandmother.

We have often seen farmers struggle a lot to get their yield from farm to market. They often have to spend a lot of manual labour just to get the produce from farm to tractor. As many of these farms do not have an access road, tractors and trucks cannot reach the spot easily.

With this new 600-metre access road, things are going to be different, and even during the monsoon, they don’t have to worry about their farm being cut off from the rest. The images of the newly built farm road have been circulating on social media since the reports came out.

In fact, the villagers have installed a board on the road with Shrikant and Anjali’s names on it. We also see the couple next to the board, with villagers and family members around them. What was once a very narrow trail has now been converted into a proper road.