Yet another academic year is drawing to a close. As students and their parents prepare to usher in a new classroom, new textbooks and new notebooks, how many of them spare a thought for what happens to the old ones? Especially notebooks that still have unused pages left.
An estimated 200 crore unused sheets in notebooks of school children reportedly go to the bin every year in Karnataka. This is why citizen volunteers are now stepping in to creating a repository of such papers to bring them back to life.
The NGO Youth for Seva, in the second year of its ‘Give Paper Back’ initiative, is aiming at collecting 1.5 lakh notebooks that they can recycle to be reused by children of government schools in rural areas. Last year, volunteers had collected over 35,000 books that were segregated, rebound and distributed among school children, volunteers said.
Karthik S., a volunteer from south Bengaluru, said children usually use half a notebook. “The rest is blank. We segregate the used and unused pages, bind the blank ones together and distribute them to students in rural government schools. Some schools voluntarily drop notebooks into the carton box we have kept there after exams. In south Bengaluru alone, some 15 schools have shown a positive response,” he said.
Bhargavi Nagabhushan, the Bengaluru project coordinator for Youth for Seva, said the project covered Sirsi, Tumakuru, Hassan, Chikkamagaluru, Belagavi, Mysuru, Mandya and Hubballi districts last year. This year, citizens of Davangere district have expressed interest in supporting this initiative.
“We have another project, ‘School Kit Drive’, through which we provide school bags, geometrical instruments and notebooks to underprivileged children. The government gives them textbooks. Through the Give Paper Back initiative, we will now be able to procure the required notebooks,” she added.
Each new notebook costs around ₹20. Volunteers said the cost of recycling is not high.
Ms. Bhargavi can be contacted at 7337813526. People who wish to contribute can also get in touch with the volunteers via email at contact@youthforseva.org.
