India: Bihar teen shot dead for charging Rs10 for a boat ride

Patna: A teenager was shot dead in Bihar for charging Rs10 as fare for ferrying the brother of a muscleman on his boat.

The cost of a single bullet used in the revolver ranges between Rs500 and Rs700 in Bihar.

Police said 17-year-old Sikil Yadav, a resident of Samastipur district, had been plying the boat in the flooded villages to transport marooned villagers in the absence of any means of transport. Some 20 districts of Bihar are currently in the grip of floods.

The boy had collected Rs10 from one Anil Yadav who used his boat to reach another place on Sunday evening. The demand for boat fare, however, angered Yadav who reported the matter to his muscleman brother Ranbir Yadav.

On Monday, the muscleman visited the boy’s home and hurled abuses at him for his audacity to ask for money from his brother, police said. Subsequently, the boy assured to return Rs10 he had collected as boat fare from his brother but the accused whipped out his revolver in a fit of rage and shot at the boy.

The bullets hit the teenager’s abdomen as he sustained grievous wounds. He was rushed to the local primary health centre from where he was referred to the main government hospital in the district but he succumbed to the injuries midway.

“My son was killed just for charging Rs10 as boat fare,” victim’s father Om Prakash Yadav told the me-dia on Tuesday. He added the entire village was under thigh-deep to waist-deep water due to floods and his son was only helping the villagers by transporting them from one place to another. “My son was charging only a paltry sum,” he said.

A local police officer in charge of investigation Mohammad Khushibuddin said the police had registered the case and the raids were on to nab the accused.

In a similar incident, a labourer was beaten to death for seeking his due wage of 10kg of rice from the landlord in lieu of transplanting paddy seedlings in latter farmlands in Nalanda, the home district of Bi-har chief minister Nitish Kumar.

The victim Upendra Ravidas, a Dalit, had been promised 10kg of rice by the landlord Dinesh Mahto for transplanting paddy but when he demanded his wages, he was assaulted with bamboo sticks and killed on Monday, a relative of the victim alleged in a complaint to the police. The police said the accused was absconding.