Making use of the unused

Updated on: Friday, September 03, 2010

There are many children, less privileged than the others, who do not wake up to go to school every morning or even get a chance to read a book. It is to reach out to such children, that Aviva has joined hands with Save the Children and Vidyarambam Trust.

After generating a donation of close to 1, 23,000 books last year in Delhi, Aviva is bringing the ‘Aviva Great Wall of Education’ to Chennai this year. This massive book donation drive that will begin on September 5 will end with Aviva segregating and distributing the books to the schools and NGOs like Save the Children and Vidyarambam Trust.

This is not the first time that Save the Children is partnering with Aviva. Last year, the NGO reached out to close to 50,000 children across six States through the book donation drive. Having its presence in 12 States across India, the organisation works for underprivileged children who do not have opportunities to avail a formal education.

For Vidyarambam however, it is their first time with Aviva. Vidyarambam which is into its ninth year now, runs its own after-school learning centres in various villages in Tamil Nadu. The trust claims to have given education to five lakh children since its inception. “We are established in 12 districts across the State, and have our centres in many villages that are very backward. We expect to distribute books that we get from Aviva to around 30,000 children in these areas,” says V. Ranganathan, Founder and President, Vidyarambam Trust.

Want of Tamil books

Since both these NGOs work with children under 14 years, the demand for the kind of books has been fairly specific. For instance, Vidyarambam says that it has asked for NCERT books up to class five, activity books, thesauruses, dictionaries, atlases and books teaching alphabets and numbers for pre-school children. Since these books will go to children who have either had no formal education or are being educated in Tamil medium schools with English being one of the subjects, there is a pressing need for books in the regional language. To that, Save the Children, says that it did get a lot of Hindi books from the book donation drive at Delhi, and that Chennai would be no different.

Making use of the unused

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