Shyama Pada Sharma on his bicycle at Dehri-on-Sone in Rohtas. Picture by Sanjay Choudhary

Shyama Pada Sharma has turned his passion of cycling into a mission.

After his polio eradication awareness campaign on the wheels a couple of years ago, Sharma has hit the road again. On August 15, the 42-year-old set out from his modest home in Bengal’s Durgapur with a message, “Plant a sapling to save the earth”, that he wants to spread among people during his 1,700-odd-km ride to New Delhi.

On Wednesday, he was in Dehri-on-Sone, a subdivisional town on the NH-2 in Maoist-affected Rohtas district where he even requested policemen to plant saplings on the police station premises. “It doesn’t matter whether you are a professional, a businessman or a petty shopkeeper like me. It is everybody’s responsibility to contribute something to the society. No mission is complete without people’s participation,” said Sharma, who runs a grocery shop in Durgapur. “In fact, I want to meet President Pranab Mukherjee to tell him how people from different social classes are making efforts for environment conservation,” he added.

He had taken up such awareness campaign rides in Assam, Odisha, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra and Chennai. “I decided to take up environment protection campaign as no fresh case of polio has hardly been reported in the country in the recent past,” said the father of two.

Before pedalling out of Dehri-on-Sone, he said that he would cover about 100-120 km every day to reach the next destination.