Job for Indian royal descendant

A descendant of India’s last Mughal emperor has been rescued from a life of penury in Calcutta by getting a job with the state-run Coal India.
Madhu is the illiterate great-great-granddaughter of emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar and has been employed to run errands in Coal India’s offices.
A letter of employment will be formally handed over to her by the coal minister at a function in Calcutta next month.
She and her mother currently run a tea stall in the slums of Calcutta.
Rehabilitation
“It will be great to have Madhu working for us. Actually, it will be a great tribute to the last Mughal emperor who played a key role during the first war of independence in 1857,” Coal India Chairman Partha Bhattacharyya said.
The move by Coal India follows sustained efforts by a Delhi-based journalist Shivnath Jha, who launched a campaign to rescue her from poverty.
Madhu’s cause was one of several highlighted by Mr Jha and his wife Neena in an initiative to rehabilitate descendants of the forgotten heroes of India’s independence wars.
Mr Jha told the BBC that he first hit upon this idea when he tried to raise funds for one of India’s greatest classical musicians, Bismillah Khan, earlier in the decade.
“We published a pictorial biography of Bismillah Khan and raised some funds. After his death, we institutionalised this movement,” Mr Jha said.
Last year, he persuaded India’s former Railway Minister Laloo Prasad Yadav to help the descendants of Tantia Tope, one of the leaders of the 1857 mutiny which many Indians say was in fact the country’s first war of independence.