Inside the survey to enumerate India's oldest fault line

The muddy expanse of the Ganga stretched out in front of her, Afreen Jahan waited on the sandy shores on the outskirts of Patna one Monday morning in early May, her face and hands draped in a dupatta.

- Dhrubo Jyoti and Ruchir Kumar

Before her, snaking into the distance was a pontoon bridge, hundreds of metal decks grating against each other, bobbing up and down in the gentle current of the summer river. Large autorickshaws, cars, and a train of motorcycles sputtered nervously across the undulating length of the visibly unstable bridge, dismantled at the cusp of every monsoon. On the other side lay one of the dozens of Gangetic riverine islands, diara in local parlance, that fall in the shadow of whatever meagre development funds trickle into the region. One of those diaras is where the 32-year-old worked, as a teacher of Urdu.

For about 20 days beginning April 15, Jahan followed a tight schedule. She left her house on the outskirts of Patna around 6.30am, took a shared ride in a hulking autorickshaw squished with nine to 10 other people, then another across the river, arriving at her school in Patlapur village two hours later. There, inside one of the rooms with peeling white paint and tattered sketches of children's drawings pasted on the wall, were stacked piles upon piles of forms; broadsheet sized and chequered black-and-white. Jahan would pick up some and be back on the road by 9am, knocking at the doors of houses that had them, or hollering names outside the mud-caked ones.