Youth For People's Notebook Drive Bridges The Gap Between the Urban Luxuries And Rural Necessities

In the evening of July 11, 2006, when a call centre employee was peacefully taking his nap, the TV screens flashed with news of 7 bomb blasts that took place simultaneously within 11 minutes in Mumbai. Deep down he knew life was never going to be the same again. He rushed to his nearby hospital and what he witnessed there was nothing less than traumatic. Dipesh Tank along with his brother and some friends stayed at the hospital all night long donating blood and helping the hospital staff. As more and more patients kept pouring in, the situation started getting worse for the staff, however, Dipesh and his friends offered a helping hand to their full potential. 

Once everything was settled, Dipesh allowed everything to sink in and while introspecting the entire situation he realised that individuals who are willing to help for social welfare can come together in spite of having a full-time job. This is when he started an NGO ‘Youth For People’ that came together to rescue citizens in need of help. These can be called the ‘sleeper cells’ for a good cause. 

His visit to a tribal area of Jawahar and Mokhada in Palghar district broadened a whole new horizon for him. It's a place that's just 100km away from Mumbai yet oblivious with basic facilities. Tank observed a huge gap between the urban and rural area and felt an urgent need to bridge this gap.

The schools were around 12 kms far and the basic transportation facilities weren’t there. As Dipesh quoted “Government made Right To Education but there hasn’t been access to education, therefore we came up with a project of ‘Campus Bicycle’ where we raised funds and donated bicycles to the students to bridge the gap between their residence and school. However, as the wage of people there was as low as ₹ 100 they started selling those bicycles to make ends meet. Therefore we discontinued our bicycle drive". 

We then observed that as per government regulations, kids are provided with textbooks and mid-day meal but they didn't have access to notebooks, therefore, they used to come to schools and just listen to the teacher but could never jot down anything and just went home. They were even deprived of the privilege of taking notes and scribbling on the last page of the book, something we could do whenever we wanted to. Therefore we came up with a notebook drive where we distributed 12 notebooks to each kid for their entire curriculum year which hardly costs ₹100 to us. We started with distributing 1000 books which then went up to 60,000 and now we can proudly say that we distribute around 2 lakh books to over 40,000 children for a year.

The smile on their face brings immense pleasure to us as we even see what they wrote on the notebook and how such a small gesture has helped them to develop as an individual and has drastically decreased the school drop out rate as they have something to look forward to.  

In a nutshell, as Malala famously quoted One child, one teacher, one book, one pen can change the world, Youth For People is accomplishing it one step at a time.