Wipro Earthian 2013

I got an invite to attend the Earthian function at Wipro. Earthian is an educational and sustainability initiative by Wipro that promotes green thinking  at schools and colleges across India. This is done through a competition that involves activities and paper presentations based on sustainability theme.

As a Wipro employee, we can register as mentors for the programme. I had reached out to a few schools over mails and phone to make them understand about Earthian. The competition this year was based on activities that highlighted the importance of water. It focused on water usage, wastage and conservation at school level. Colleges were also encouraged to participate and had to present papers on this topic.

Do check out this website for more information - http://www.wipro.org/earthian/

They have good activity booklets which can be used anytime for conducting fun activities at school.

We reached the venue a little late and seated ourselves in the last row. IIM-K and Prakriya Green wisdom school won the main awards this year. It was good to see that the winners included children from schools in the North-east, Rajasthan, and Gujarat. Through Wipro Cares Earthian’s reach had extended to rural areas. The submission was allowed in two languages – English and Hindi.

All mentors were felicitated for their help in spreading the word - I was given a book on Himalayas -  “Himalayas.. the mountain of life” by Kamal Bawa and Sandesh Kadur. One of those books that you always eye at libraries, go awe over its photos but don’t have the heart to spend so much to buy it! It is an awesome addition to our collection.

The day was packed with speeches by “Social heroes”. They represented varied domains but clearly demonstrated that hard work and perseverance pays off in any field of work.

Sanchaita Raju urged the audience to look at social entrepreneurship as a viable career option. She is founder of Social Awareness and Newer Alternatives that specializes in providing sanitation and drinking water to villages in Rajasthan and Delhi.   Sumit Dagar, the man who is developing smartphones for the blind was also present with an Endurance athelete named Ganesh pallya. All of them had one thing in common – they were ordinary people who were young but had dared to take a different route to help others.

As the lectures and questions progressed, somethings that impressed upon me were

1.       Many school kids already appreciate the fact that we have limited natural resources

2.       There are people doing good to the society in many ways – be it an NGO or a profitable social start-up

3.       Better to improve spoken Hindi – these prominent speakers themselves were struggling to translate their stories. There was a translator to help children from non-english background understand but story lacked luster as it got translated.

We will be registering as mentors for 2014 and are planning to reach out to schools in Goa. 

This weekend it the Flower show in LalbaghJ. There seems to be focus on Kitchen gardening and am excited about what I can learn to improve our balcony greens.