This is where their dreams will be made. Or that is what City Police Commissioner P. Vijayan hopes for.
A group of 126 students, along with 20 of their teachers, from the tribal hamlets of Attappady reached the city on Saturday by train as part of an effort by the Student Police Cadet project to give them ‘an insight into what the world had on offer for them’.
The students, 86 of whom are from the Scheduled Tribes community, were welcomed by Mr. Vijayan and SPC State Assistant Nodal Officer K.G. Babu along with other police officials at the Commissioner’s Office here, after which they were taken on a tour of various spots in and around the city.
According to Mr. Vijayan, the aim was to help the children dream big.
“Once they are given more exposure to sights outside their world, the world of their dreams too will be bigger, and they will remember that there is always a bigger world with plenty of opportunities out there,” he said.
The SPC project has another objective as well with this trip, says Mr. Vijayan. By encouraging the children from tribal hamlets to dream big and to aspire for higher education and jobs, they would not fall prey to the ideologies of Maoists. “Once they start dreaming big, they won’t think about taking up arms,” is his belief and principle behind encouraging them to aspire for more.
The spots visited by the group on Friday, included ISRO, the Kowdiar Palace, the Central Prison, the State Assembly, the Sree Padmanabhaswamy Temple and so on. “Some of them were seeing even a train for the first time. So we hope this trip will be an enlightening one for them, helping to mould their ambitions and future itself,” Mr. Babu said.
Such trips would be a regular affair, with SPC students from the city too to be taken on trips to areas like Attappady to ‘show them how life away from the city was’.
