Bharatpur, Dec. 2 -- After months of repeated appeals to authorities to build a connecting road or a bridge on the Parvati river yielded little action, locals in Dholpur district's Ajaypura village took matters into their own hands and built a crowd- funded temporary causeway over a period of three days. The river flows between the Nidhera Kalan and the Bothpura gram panchayats. For several hundred students living in the nearly two dozen village under the gram panchayat, an anicut built during the Ashok Gehlot-led regime served as the only means to cross the river to attend classes in the Bothpura senior secondary school. There is no road connecting the two panchayats. Ajaypura village has an Upper Primary School, but students must travel to Bothpura for senior secondary classes after completing middle school. While the school is barely 500 metres from the anicut, students were forced to take a 35- kilometre detour through the nearby national highway if they wished to avoid the river, locals said. Vinod Kumar, a local, said that a total of Rs.90,000 was spent to build the causeway, which was put together through donations from each house in the village. The causeway consists of cement pipes covered by earth to create a slope. Bhura Singh, another local, said the structure was built primarily to serve the students. Generally, the overflow in the river during monsoon meant that students from Nidhera Kalan would miss classes for several weeks.Last year, four girls drowned after they lost their footing while trying to cross the anicut during monsoon. Locals said the Congress government had built the anicut in 2019 to address water scarcity. The structure improved water availability, but in the absence of a bridge, they have repeatedly written to the chief minister demanding a safe crossing....