Everyday Dashrath Manjhi looks from the top of the mountain in the Gehlaur Hills that separates his remote, poor village of Gehlaur from the nearest, more affluent village Warzirgani on the other side.  Everyday adults and children from his village have to either walk 43 difficult miles around the mountain or make the grueling long climb over it to get to Warzirgani for work, education, food, medical care, etc.  Everyone in Gehlaur had grown tired of choosing only from those two options.

One day, out of frustration, Manjhi threw a stone against the side of the mountain and watched it dissolve into powder.  This gave him an idea for a new seemly impossible third option…carving a path through the mountain.  So Manjhi traded his three goats, which were the only things he could sell, to buy a hammer and a chisel. Each day from sunrise to sunset, only stopping to eat and rest, he would climb the mountain and dig.  The people in the village told him that he was “crazy” and that “a man can’t change a mountain”, but Manjhi could visualize something that they could not and that was parting the mountain into two great halves with a road in between.​

Ten years passed and Manjhi continued digging and making slow progress carving a path through the mountain.  Soon villagers could see real progress and Manji began to find warm food, hot drinks, and new tools awaiting him at the work site.  He also noticed that sometimes when he arrived at the mountain the next morning that others had continued his work overnight, because the opening was a little longer than when he had left it.  One day, 22 years after he began digging, his path through the mountain had been completed. People gathered around Manjhi as he looked from one village to the other through the path he had carved in the mountain.​

This is a true story of Dashrath Manjhi, an Indian laborer, who became revered and known as the Mountain Man.  He began digging the path 1960 and completed it in 1982.  The path through the mountain, located near Gaya in Bihar, India, is 360 feet long, 30 feet high, 25 feet wide.  Manjhi’s path was converted to an official road after his death on August 17, 2007.​

"Manjhi Moves a Mountain" is an amazing story of an individual’s dedication, persistence, and vision to overcome obstacles in life.