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Gurgaon student's NPO raising awareness about global issues

A student of Gurgaon's Blue Bells Public School, Shubha Gupta, founded her NPO at the age of 14 to team up with teens for solving global issues.

Tuesday March 07, 2017,

3 min Read

Why did you take up a project focusing on Plantation ? "I recently went to a conference in Delhi , TAFSMUN'16 ,UNPA and the agenda was 'Working on the Post 2015 agenda' . The Post 2015 agenda consists of MDGs ( Millenium development goals ) and SDGs ( Sustainable development goals) .Goal 13 of the SDGs is climate change which requires urgent action.After the conference, I was really motivated to create awareness to solve this Issue. That's when the idea of 'THE PLANTATION WEEKEND' came to me. " says Shubha Gupta, CEO, THE LUCID SCIENCE.

Much before the launch of this project, The page has been sharing posts and news related to simple science that should concern each one of us. When this did not help, Shubha decided to adopt a different approach. She focused on the page's outreach to find her target audience. "When I started this NPO, I did not start it with the objective of campaigning and protesting on streets, that's old school and ineffective. We cannot adopt Gandhi ji's way used decades back to achieve something in today's time. The Lucid Science has a target audience, the youth and almost every teen today has a phone and is on more than one social networking site. Thus, I knew what to do and where to do it. " she added

The Plantation Weekend ( 7th -8th January ) saw entries coming from every corner of India and some from abroad. The idea was to motivate teens to sow a seed or plant a tree and send pictures of them doing so. All the pictures were featured on the page and the weekend successfully ended with approximately 100 entries.

On asking the reason behind choosing plantation to help mitigate the after effects of carbon emissions , she said , " For instance, A car ride from Bangalore to Mumbai releases 110kg of carbon dioxide. This carbon dioxide ends up in our atmosphere not allowing the heat to escape into outer space. Trees and plants absorb this carbon dioxide and store it in their trunks. Simple science we all know about but forget to use it , cause we're all so 'busy'. "

What'll be your next focus ?

I think I'll have a similar plantation weekend during the summer vacations with better planning. Till then, I'll be focusing on making potential collaborations. In January , We teamed up with DISCERNMENT INTERNATIONAL SUMMIT 1.0 and the result has taught me to work in teams to establish better results. 

Do you have any message for your followers ?

"I just want to stress on the fact that Climate change is not a hoax. It's real, we need to start acting now in order to avoid catastrophic situations in the future. " says Shubha , a student trying to bring change.We're calling her ' OUR LAST WAKE UP CALL' .