Financial child adoption and Green Campus Challenge are IIT Bombay’s social initiatives for its Techfest this academic year.
Last week, national Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) president Nitin Gadkari started the initiative of ‘Give-a-Coin’. One can donate a coin to spread awareness about financial child adoption.
“We have collaborated with Pratham Council for Vulnerable Children (PCVC) for the ‘Give-a-Coin’ initiative, to promote financial child adoption,” said Shrey Singh, media manager for Techfest.
“Donors provide funds for education, shelter, nutrition and medical care of a child. The NGO handles their allocation, regularly giving the donors details of how their money has been spent. The ‘Give-a-coin’ initiative does not actually aim at collecting donations but creating awareness about the unique process so that weaker section of the society can be benefited,” he added.
Green Campus Challenge includes formation of green clubs in as many colleges as possible across India and making them participate proactively towards a greener world.
This nationwide initiative will be spread over 11 cities and will reach out to students of top 40 colleges of India. The first phase of this 45-day campaign has already started in five zones covering colleges of Jaipur, Surat, Hyderabad, Bhopal and Mumbai.
This Green Campus initiative which was limited only to IITB campus in the academic year 2010-11 will now be spread to each and every college in India. This will be one-of-a-kind initiative which will involve challenges to promote the green cause.
The green clubs will have to perform green tasks to win the competition and bag the Rs2.5lakh prize money. “Colleges and students will be proactive as there is an incentive,” said Shrey.
The challenge involves 99 tasks in all of various difficulty levels that have been divided into 11 genres including energy, climate and air, sustainability, social outreach, bio-diversity and land management, green, food, waste, social media, water, design and creative. The teams will have to do the maximum number of tasks before December 20 to win the challenge.
