Jyoti Kumari, the 15-year-old migrant girl cycled 1200 km from Gurugram to Bihar over eight days with her ailing father in tow. She has been offered a trial by the Cycling Federation of India. They have offered to take her on for training to be a professional cyclist.
The courageous story of Jyoti has also reached the White House in the USA. President Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump tweeted lauding the Indian girl. “15 yr old Jyoti Kumari, carried her wounded father to their home village on the back of her bicycle covering +1,200 km over 7 days. This beautiful feat of endurance & love has captured the imagination of the Indian people and the cycling federation!🇮🇳,” she wrote.
However, the tweet was trolled by netizens in Indians. They slammed Ivanka for glorifying the migrant workers’ poverty as a “beautiful feat”.
Check out the tweets here:
Responding to Ivanka, former Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Omar Abdullah said: “Her poverty and desperation are being glorified as if Jyoti rode 1,200 km for the thrill of it. The government failed her, that”s hardly something to trumpet as an achievement.”
Celebrity photographer Atul Kasbekar too tweeted,
For the initiated, Jyoti’s father, an electric rickshaw driver had experienced an accident before the lockdown. Their landlord asked them to vacate the premises as they were unable to pay the rent. So Jyoti decided to take her father back home to Darbhanga. She bought a used bicycle and cycled 1,200 kilometres with her injured father. It took eight days for the young teenager to pedal all the way to Darbhanga from Gurgaon.
The COVID-19 lockdown has deprived hundreds of thousands of daily wage earners of their livelihood. Each day scores of them are seen trudging back to their villages.
Also Read: COVID-19 Lockdown: Indian Migrant Workers Carry Their Pets On Shoulders Amid Pandemic Crisis