Other States - Orissa   

Making people pay up

BERHAMPUR: Festivities also come with the pinch of ‘Dushera mamool’ for the residents of the city. No one can escape from paying it. ‘Bakshis’ related to Dushera also exist in other parts of the State. But in Berhampur, it has a mandatory tag attached to it. Houses in the city bear special symbols on their outer walls. These symbols denote whether the family living in the house has paid mamool to workers of essential service sectors like Southco, the BSNL and the Public Health Engineering Department (PHED), which supplies drinking water. No one can dare irk the workers of these sectors.

These workers divide the city into sectors and move in groups with registers in hand to collect mamool. They fix a definite rate for each house. The symbols are marked using indelible ink or wax crayons. One may try to dodge the mamool collectors by putting a similar mark on the wall of his house. But he cannot dodge the registers. During the puja season, the mamool collectors are found every where, from grocery shops to restaurants to petrol pumps. The owners of these establishments say they divide the money collected among their low-level workers as a kind of Puja bonus.

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