A story of extraordinary grit.

"Late Dasrath (in pic) had undertaken a Herculean task, perhaps unequalled in recent human history"
  Late Dashrath Manjhi - the mountain man, who 'single-handedly' carved a 360-foot-long (110 m), 25-foot-high (7.6 m) and 30-foot-wide (9.1 m) road by cutting a mountain of Gehlour hills, Gaya district, Bihar, with a hammer, chisel and nails working day and night for 22 years from 1960 to 1982. This passage reduced the distance between Atri and Wazirganj blocks of Gaya district from 70 km to just 7 km.
 Every morning, for 22 long years, a frail, diminutive man, barefoot and clad in a loin cloth, would trudge two kilometres to a hillock of solid rock and chip away at it with a hammer and chisel. Bemused onlookers thought he had lost his mind, and he was an object of great fun for village urchins. But the women of the village, young and old, admired him, for his was a labour of love. His twenty two years of hard work was inspired by his love, his wife.
 Dasrath eked out a living as a farm hand, toiling in the fields of local landlords on bare subsistence wages. One day, in the early '60s, his wife Phaguni fell ill and Dasrath set off with her to the nearest hospital. She died on the way. If only there was no hill blocking the road to the town, Dasrath would have made it to the hospital in time, and perhaps his wife's life would have been saved.
  The situation would have brought about a feeling of resignation or fatalism in the average man—as if God had himself put this giant obstacle in the path of his ailing wife. Dasrath's response was different and radical—at once unthinkable and stunningly simple. He decided to alter geography with chisel and hammer. To cut a road through the huge mass of rock.
 After 22 years of back-breaking, single-handed toil, Dasrath finished in the mid-'80s.
  Many advised him to place a request to the state government for building a road but his voice counted for nothing with the state government. Dasrath himself remained a humble, self-effacing man, doing nothing to attract publicity for his titanic feat of endurance. It didn't even bother him that the Limca Book of World Records misrepresented his achievement by giving wrong statistics that significantly reduced the size of the rocky hill he cut through, chip by chip.
 The recognition that had been denied Dasrath during his lifetime finally came after his death in 2007 at the age of 80. Dasrath was given a state funeral at his village, his body draped in the tricolour and men in uniform serving as pall-bearers.

http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?235441