In 1959, in the remote village of Gehlour in Bihar, Dashrath Manjhi's wife was seriously injured and, because the nearest hospital lay on the far side of a large hill, the journey around it took so long that she died before receiving proper medical care. The hill added roughly forty kilometers to what should have been a short trip.
Manjhi, a poor laborer with no formal engineering training and no government support, decided the hill itself was the problem and resolved to remove it. He sold his few goats to buy a hammer and chisel and began, alone, chipping away at the rock face of the hill.
He worked at it for twenty-two years, largely by himself, through ridicule from neighbors who thought he had lost his mind, financial hardship that forced him to sometimes work other jobs to survive, and the sheer physical toll of manually cutting through solid rock day after day with hand tools.
By 1982, he had carved a passage through the hill 360 feet long, 30 feet wide, and 25 feet high, reducing the journey between his village and the nearest town from around fifty-five kilometers to about fifteen. He became known across India as the 'Mountain Man,' and the government later formally paved the road he had cut by hand.