Bechan Kumar, a 16-year-old from Bihar had many twists and turns in his short life before he ended up at the Sports Authority of India’s centre in Gandhinagar, where he is now training for the under-16 Kabaddi team with 33 other players from different states.
Born to a poor family at Madhuban village in Bihar’s Sitamarhi district, Bechan worked in a knitting factory in Delhi’s Badarpur area.
Dresses in his SAI tracksuit and looking across the sprawling fields of the campus, Bechan remembers vividly how he used to work for 18 hours and get beaten up by his owner.
He was rescued by the police and sent back to Bihar in 2004. His father’s death the previous year had left him with his mother, four brothers and three sisters to help feed, and he found himself drifting as a worker again, this time in a plywood factory in Sitamarhi itself.
In 2005, workers of Pratham, an NGO, rescued him and was made to study in their school, called Pratham Gyaanshala. He was not outstanding in studies; he longed rather to play sports, especially kabaddi. “I used to see kids playing kabaddi. One day, I told my seniors, ‘I also want to play’, and they said ‘You can’t play that. You’ll only get hurt’. But I did not listen to them,†he said.