Ms Pankaj General Store

This general store is located at Piska More in the Hehal area of Ranchi. We are right on Itki Road, which is a very busy junction. If you live in Ranchi, you know how much traffic passes through Piska More every single minute. I started this shop to provide basic things to the people living in the colonies nearby. We keep everything from soaps and detergents to basic stationery like notebooks and glue. The shop is tucked into a building along the road, and it’s usually quite noisy because of the buses and tempos outside. I spend my day sitting on a wooden chair, waiting for people to come in. Sometimes it’s busy, and sometimes I just sit and watch the rain. Ranchi has a lot of rain, and the Itki Road gets quite messy then. I keep the floor as clean as I can, but people bring in a lot of mud. I don't have any staff, so I do everything myself—the cleaning, the stocking, and the selling. I buy my stock from the big market and bring it here on a rickshaw. It’s hard work sometimes, especially when the heavy bags of rice arrive. But I’ve been doing this for a long time now. The neighbors are good people and they’ve been coming to me for years. It’s just a normal shop for daily needs, nothing more and nothing less for the community.