Sonam, New Youth National Record Holder and Daughter of a Brick Kiln Worker, Works as Delivery Agent

Sonam, broke the record in the Girls’ 2000m steeplechase, finishing with a time of 6.45.71 minutes at the Khelo India Youth Games 2022 Madhya Pradesh (KIYG2022MP).

Sonam left behind her second-placed rival C. Keerthana of Telangana more than half a minute behind in the distance race, with a fantastic burst of speed in the final leg at the T.T. Nagar stadium in Bhopal.

The 18-year-old Sonam, who broke Parul Chaudhary’s decade-old national record, delivers parcels in Delhi’s Kotla Mubarakpur area during her time away from training. Her father works in a brick kiln in the Bulandshahr district of Uttar Pradesh while her mother is a farm labourer.

After she returned from Bhopal to Hurthala village in UP, Sonam was taken a 5-km victory parade of her village in an open-top jeep as she garlanded a statue of BR Ambedkar in the dalit district.

“You can’t dream big when you aren’t even sure if you will get your next meal,” Sonam was quoted saying by The Indian Express.

With her father, Vir Singh’s daily earnings being about Rs 300, Sonam said providing food for him was difficult.

“I would often sleep with an empty stomach. When the price of potatoes fell, my mother would buy them in bulk. She would boil and dry them in the sun so that they lasted longer,” Sonam said.

Sonam revealed that she took to running when she saw boys from her village training to join the Indian Army.

“You toil so much in the field, if you put in the same effort in sports, you will go far,” one of them reportedly told Sonam.

Her father said that he did not want his life for his daughter.

“I didn’t want my daughter to have a life like mine… We have to cover the furnace with sand and walk over it. If even one brick gets loose, we will be sucked in. The soles of our chappals melt due to the heat. We tie wooden planks on them. Apart from the heat, we inhale so much dust that everyone working at the brick kiln has breathing issues,” he said.