For a social cause with belief in change

Members of Young India Fraternity clean up beach after idol immersion

People participating in beach clean-up programme in Visakhapatnam. Photo: C.V. Subrahmanyam

While the city boasts of a beautiful coastline, it is often littered with heaps of wastes marring the beauty and turning it into an eyesore. This issue gets aggravated after the idol immersion during Vinayaka Chavithi. Spotting this issue, members of the Young India Fraternity (YIF) organised a systematic beach clean-up campaign on Sunday morning involving more than 400 registered volunteers who collected and segregated tonnes of waste at R.K. Beach in association with GVMC.

Awareness campaign

The YIF’s awareness campaign for the beach cleaning drive started days before the main event in city schools and colleges and also through the medium of social networking forums in order to reach out to a maximum number of people. “Through the programme, we also wanted to sensitise the public on civic issues and the need to keep our beaches clean,” said Chhetan Velamala, one of the members of the core team of YIF.

YIF was formed in the year 2012 by a group of college students – Dinesh Rajagiri, Chhetan, Pravin and Siddhartha – who got together through Facebook and connected with one another due to their similar takes on social and political issues plaguing the society. Since then, the team has expanded its reach to as many as 30 active members and has been conducting various events like tree plantation drive, distribution of plants, eco-friendly approach in celebrating festivals and many other programmes primarily involving the youth. With the motto ‘We believe in change’ – the team aims at addressing social issues by organising programmes every Sunday.

Their next event is called ‘Cup of Rice’. “This will be a door-to-door campaign where we will be collecting a cup of rice from residential areas and later, distributing it in the slum areas,” said Chhetan, who is presently based in Delhi and comes to the city to organise and participate in the events of YIF.

Like Chhetan, the other core team members too are based in cities like Hyderabad, who coordinate for the events from their respective places and fly down to the city during the programmes.