Asst Engineer

Down here in Bachhran village, life moves at its own pace. I’m the assistant engineer for this area in the Chitrakoot district of Uttar Pradesh. The address is basically just the village and the post office, which tells you how rural it is. Our office is a simple room with a couple of chairs and a heavy wooden desk that’s probably older than I am. Out here, the work is mostly about the local roads, the water pumps, and whatever the village needs fixed. It’s dusty in the summer and the roads get difficult when the rains come, but we manage. People walk in all day with different issues, and there isn't really a formal system. You just talk to whoever is sitting there. We don't have high-speed internet or fancy computers. A lot of the record-keeping is still done in big registers with cloth covers. The view outside the window is just fields and the occasional cow wandering by. It’s a far cry from the big city engineering firms, but the work feels more direct here. You can see the results of what you do when a new pipe is laid or a path is cleared. We don't have a mission statement or a fancy slogan. We just try to help out with the local infrastructure and keep the paperwork moving through the district office. It's basic work for basic needs, and we just handle things as they come.