Anyone who is cynical about today’s youth could draw some inspiration from a silent movement sweeping across colleges and schools in the country.
Working under the aegis of Project Chirag with its origin in Mumbai’s HR college, the initiative has been lighting up lives in the rural hinterland by way of solar technology.
What started out two years ago when five HR college students informally decided to step out and “do something” has today snowballed into a movement involving over 12,000 students across 15 schools of Mumbai. Numerous corporates and benevolent individuals have loosened their purse-strings — allcollectively contributing to bringing light to over 4,000 homes across 106 villages in Maharashtra, Rajasthan, UP and Karnataka.
“When we started out in 2010, we randomly visited a few villages in Wada tehsil of Thane district of Maharashtra. We were shocked to find that some of the villages were plunged in darkness,” recalls 25-year-old Jyotirmoy Chatterji, who co-founded Project Chirag, saying the stark disparity had hit them hard.
Barely a few kilometres from the financial capital, villagers didn’t even have electricity poles and the few who had mobile phones often walked over 10km to the district town to charge them.
The friends started out by snapping lights in their college corridors to sensitise fellow collegians
about living in the dark and doubled it up with a modest fund-raising plea for Rs 10. They raked up an overwhelming Rs 5.5 lakh in the first week itself, motivating them to broaden the canvas of their work. At a budget of Rs 4,000 per home, they involved students in setting up a solar light, solar panels as well as mobile charging facility in over 100 homes in Ujjaini village of Maharashtra. Interestingly, they involved differently abled children to assemble the solar lights.
With their first project a runaway success and enthusiasm scaled, they started approaching schools to involve more under-20-year-olds. Gradually they won the faith of corporates who agreed to fund the solar lights.
“Satisfying,” is how Chatterji describes the journey, saying the best reward was when they re-visited Ujjaini village a year later and found that more students had cleared the Xth standard SSC exam than previous years. “They said the lighting enabled them to study through the night.”
No comments:
Post a Comment