Via 40-day drive, Bengaluru kids aim to provide notebooks to students from rural govt' schools

In a laudable initiative, school children residing in apartments in Whitefield and Mahadevapura in Bengaluru have spent a chunk of their vacation creating notebooks for kids studying in government schools in rural areas.

Altogether 100 kilograms of unused sheets of notebooks and four boxes of books have been mobilised by them in a 40-day drive which is set to end on May 10.

Vinay Shukla, who has just completed Class X at Investure Academy at Sarjapur, leads the group comprising kids from Classes VII, VIII and IX from different schools. They have been guided in the venture by a woman volunteer in Whitefield, who prefers to remain anonymous.

Hear it from the initiator 
Fifteen-year-old Shukla told The New Indian Express, "This was a good opportunity for me to contribute something to society. Our adult volunteer and I created an appeal and circulated it in different student WhatsApp groups and shared it with our friends. So, people found out about the cause."

Shukla added that it was a big learning experience for him and the team. "There are pages in many notebooks that are left unused. We asked residents in apartments in the areas to donate them by placing them in two boxes in their buildings, one for unused empty sheets and another for books. The empty pages came up to a total of 100 kg. We have just avoided so much paper wastage," the student added.

Which books are these?
Many of the educational books collected belong to the International General Certificate of Secondary Education (IGCSE) and International Baccalaureate (IB) medium of instruction.

"They will not be of much use to rural kids. Hence, they are being sold. A vendor is doing it for us and the money mobilised will also be used to buy notebooks," he added.

An anonymous volunteer said that Samudhura Foundation was sponsoring the costs of binding the notebooks and the transportation costs. "The binding is yet to begin. When completed, kids will take them to rural areas in Kolar and distribute it among government schools there," she said.