Mainpat Tibetan Settlement, Chattisgarh, India
About MainpatHistoryFirst established in 1962 by the Government of India in order to rehabilitate more than a thousand Tibetan refugees who fled from Tibet during the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1959. The land was made available by the State government of Madhya Pradesh and the Indian Government financed the scheme. In case of Mainpat, all the necessary arrangements such as temporary huts and ration supplies etc could not be made prior to the arrival of the settlers and as a result the settlers had to face a lot of initial hardships. The place was in fact a jungle where only a few of the local Indians were living during that time. But the landscape was beautiful besides being a very isolated place. During that time Tibetans had to go through a hard time building their huts which gradually developed to better houses where they live now. The condition of the roads were in bad shape (still the road conditions are not par excellent as compared to the most of other settlements). Like all other Tibetans during that time, people at Mainpat also had a hard time getting comfortable with the climate of the area. For them, the summers were almost un-acceptable but then as the time passed, everything started getting better. Not too long after 1965, settlement's only school for Tibetans (Central School for Tibetans) had started with the help of CTS and DoE(Department of Education, Central Tibetan Administration, Dharamsala) with Creches at some of the camps. The first Monastery (Gelug) of the Settlement was built by Dhakpo Rinpoche at Camp 1. After that a second monastery (Kagyue) came up by the grace of Khentse Ripoche at Camp 2. Following that, after a real long time, came the third monastery (Nyingma), which is now the biggest of them (compared to the structure of the monastery building), at camp 3 in 1995 by His Eminence Penor Rinpoche. There are few other small monasteries in the Settlement such as Nyingma-Choetsok and a monastery at camp 6. Recently in the year 2000, another monastery (Kagyue) had started its construction at camp 3. Since from the very beginning the main livelihood for the settlement's people had been agriculture and even today agriculture has remained to be the major contributor for the people of the settlement. Like the Tibetans from all other settlements, Mainpat's people started their hand in winter sweater selling very early. |