Page 90 - EducationWorld May 2021

People

set up an online platform inviting
the public to gift sanitary pads. This
online system which also connects
donors with beneficiary girl children
is a huge success,” says Poulomi.
The NGO’s annual budget of Rs.5
lakh is mainly self-financed with
contributions from friends-turned-
donors, education activists and local
village authorities such as ASHA
health workers, SHGs (self help
groups) and district administrative
officers.
Future plans. Inspired by the success
of their initiatives, this idealistic duo
plans to introduce additional skills
training programmes for children
and youth of North Bengal. “Hitherto
Nandy & Nandy: tribal children focus unknown skills such as financial
literacy and basic accounting need to
Idealistic LLH duo be taught to youth to make them em-
ployable. Simultaneously, we intend
to expand the reach of the mobile
library to cover a larger number of
iliguri-based engineer-turned- centre of the verdant tea gardens of rural girl children and encourage
social researcher ANIRBAN Darjeeling. “Growing up I witnessed them to undertake vermicompost,
SNANDY and wife POULOMI the huge education deficit and poor mushroom cultivation, and organic
are co-founders of Live Life Happily standards of sanitary hygiene in farming projects. Our prime objec-
(LLH, estb.2017), an NGO which the tea estates. A large number of tive is to bridge the gaping education
runs a mobile library and sanitary children especially girl children, drop and health inequality gap between
pad bank for children of tribal com- out of school to work on the estates. rural and urban children,” says
munities in 30 villages and 16 tea In 2017, Poulomi and I decided to Anirban.
gardens in five northern districts start LLH to do the best we could May your tribe increase!
of West Bengal. The mobile library towards improving education and Baishali Mukherjee (Kolkata)
houses 7,000 textbooks for class hygiene standards in these neglected
V-XII students including reference districts,” says Nandy, whose Ph D
books for competitive exams such thesis research at IIT-Kharagpur is Edupreneur Bros
as NEET and IIT-JEE. Moreover, focused on rural development in the
during the past four years, LLH has tribals dominated areas of North AJAT SINGHAL, CEO and
distributed 12,000 free-of-charge Bengal. KUNAL SINGHAL, CTO, are
sanitary pads to adolescent girl chil- According to Nandy, both these Rco-founders of the Cyboard
dren living in these remote districts projects — mobile library and the School, an online K-8 primary
of the state. sanitary pads bank — have proved launched on February 17. They are
Newspeg. On January 31, LLH a big hit with children and parents. also co-founders of the City Public
introduced beauty and skincare Under the mobile library initia- School (estb.2017), a K-8 school in
professional training programmes tive apart from lending books to Bhiwadi (Alwar district), Rajasthan
for adolescent girls of two tea estates children, the duo also provide ‘10 and rising stars of the local busi-
in Darjeeling district. takar tuition’ in computer science, ness community. Determined to
History. An alumnus of West Ben- economics, maths, political science, utilise new technologies to provide
gal University of Technology and and English for a token fee of Rs.10 uninterrupted education to children
BIT-Mesra, and currently a senior per month. whose education has been severely
research fellow at IIT-Kharagpur, The sanitary pads initiative has disrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic,
Anirban was raised in Siliguri (pop.1 also received enthusiastic support the duo has set a target of 5,000
million), a tier-II town located in from the local community. “This was enrolments by June 2021.
the Himalayan foothills and trading our first project started in 2017. We Newspeg. Expecting CBSE ac-

90 EDUCATIONWORLD MAY 2021