Samir Ghosh, 59, was offered a job at a cold-store during the lockdown but had no way to travel to his workplace on the East Burdwan border — around 10km from his native village of Ramkrishnapur near Birbhum’s Nanoor.

While offering the job, his friend Manik Banerjee had asked him whether he could cycle 20km a day to join work. And Ghosh didn’t have a cycle.

Ghosh’s elder daughter Priti, a Class IX student at a local high school, solved the problem by offering him the cycle she had got under the state government’s Sabuj Sathi scheme this year.

Chief minister Mamata Banerjee had launched Sabuj Sathi, her dream project of giving cycles to school students, in 2015.

“If her cycle was not there, I would have to lose Rs 250 per day during the lockdown. I became jobless and it was the question of my survival after I returned home from Calcutta, where I used to work as a manager at a canteen,” said Ghosh.

He was employed at the canteen of the Calcutta Referees’ Association and got stranded at his ancestral home in Nanoor after he had came to meet his family on March 16.

The long spell of the lockdown led to a financial crisis for Ghosh, who had approached his friend Manik for a job.

“I started going to the cold store in the middle of April and even now, the cycle is helping me get a regular income. As the school is closed, my daughter has no need for the cycle at all,” he said.

Bachhu Dalui, a 20-year-old youth of Napara area in Arambagh — a casual worker at a Covid-19 hospital — is one of the many who are using bicycles received from schools to work for an income.

“I was posted at the Arambagh hospital, which is around 7km from my home. I used to go there by bus. After the lockdown, the Sabuj Sathi cycle became my means to reach the hospital in time. I was transferred to the Covid hospital one-and-a-half months ago,” said Bachhu, who benefitted from the Sabuj Sathi scheme as a student in 2016. The cycle ensures that he earns Rs 314 every day.

Ghosh and Dalui are only two examples of thousands of people in rural Bengal now depending on the Sabuj Sathi cycles to go to their workplace. Bus services in rural Bengal are yet to be restored.

In its first phase of the Sabuj Sathi scheme, the state government had given cycles to all students studying in Classes IX, X, XI and XII. In the second phase, all students of Class IX get cycles every year.

Officials said the state government had given bicycles to at least one crore students since 2015 and the chief minister herself distributeed the two-wheelers from podiums during her visits to districts.

On June 3 this year, the chief minister tweeted the success of the project, claiming over one crore bicycles had been distributed in the state.

“Bicycles empower Bicycles are environment friendly…....the Sabuj Sathi project was declared a ‘Champion Project’ at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) Prizes, given by ITU, a United Nations organisation in 2019, out of 1140 projects across 18 catagories,” Mamata had tweeted.