Initiatives online and offline across country focus on helping affected students get back to school.
Hari Krishnan
CHENNAI: Help continues to pour in for the flood-ravaged city with young people from across the country taking initiatives to help students, who lost their books in the flood. “My friend, Ishak and I started an online portal where people who have or need books can post details of books and their contact details. People, who have listed themselves as donors and recipients, can interact using the details posted,” said P.V. Hari Krishnan, one of the founders of Klipher Shortfilms and a student of Velammal Engineering College. It has been about 10 days since the portal was launched and has seen over 30,000 visits and over 100 people willing to donate course books to those who could use them, said Hari Krishnan. Students of Haldia Institute of Technology in West Bengal did a donation drive for providing books to help students affected by floods.
Dipak Singh, one of the volunteers behind the drive said: “After the floods, everyone was contributing in every means possible. Our focus has been on education, so it had to be on books and notebooks for those students, who lost them during the floods.”
An initiative by Delhi-based students, DOt. NewBeginnings, also enables willing donors to pool in old books for students. Sujatha Narsimhan, based in Bangalore, is working with volunteers to get assessments of requirements of students as well as their families at a school level.
“Instead of catering to individual requests, we are working with the schools, as it helps avoid duplication, you get to reach a larger mass at one shot and if we have to buy things (not just books, it could be note books, pencils, school bags, whatever), it gives us bargaining power,” she said.
According to her, requirements are being provided to students based on what the school lists as demands. Some schools, which needed mats due to furniture getting damaged, were provided with the same.
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( Source : deccan chronicle )
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