From robotics courses for underprivileged kids to a school that has only one student, top social stories this week

India has several taboos and menstruation is one among many, especially in rural areas. Laad Lohar, 33 now, also suffered because of this. Keen on learning, Laad always wanted to go to a school but did not get any support due to the onset of her menstrual cycle. However, realising what she has lost, she set out to change the scenario so that no other girl has to go through what she did. Today, she has trained more than 500 women to make their own sanitary napkins.

Then, we have Vivek, a software engineer by profession, who has been an active cleaning campaigner for six years.

These and more on our top social stories this week:

Salaam Bombay Foundation is introducing robotics to underprivileged children across India

Run by Salaam Bombay Foundation’s skills@school, this programme provides a robotics course to many students across municipal and government schools in Pune. The programme caters to adolescents between ages of 11 and 17 years. The after-school programmes from Salaam Bombay Foundation are designed by technical experts. For the robotics class, students from municipality schools start enrolling from Class IX.

Within this programme, students receive vocational training like robotics, computer hardware, mobile repair, home appliance repair, bakery and confectionary, retail management, beauty and wellness, fashion and jewellery design, web design, and graphic design. All these courses are implemented by professional training institutes in the school settings.

This Chennai-based startup is enabling students to love mathematics

Founded in 2017, Chennai-based startup Math Love focusses on providing schools with innovative curriculum with props, games, and learning material to promote holistic numerical learning. Not only does the duo train teachers to resort to experiential techniques of pedagogy, but they also promote a better learning environment for students to gain a grasp on mathematical concepts.

Over the last two years, the startup has helped more than 460 students across three schools in Chennai. Though initially bootstrapped, Math Love is presently being incubated and mentored as part of the Teach For India’s InnovatED initiative.

This school in Bihar remains functional for one girl student

Education still remains out of reach in the remotest areas of the country. And this school in a Maoist-infested place in Gaya district in Bihar is doing something different.

This school remains functional because of one student – young Jahnavi Kumari of Class I who attends regularly. Two teachers have been allotted to teach her, no matter how inclement the weather is or how troubled the conditions are.

The school, which has been operational since 1972, despite having adequate infrastructure and decent resources, has not seen many students enroll because villagers choose to send their children to private schools.

Meet Laad Lohar, Udaipur’s ‘Pad Woman’ boosting menstrual hygiene of rural women

Thirty-three-year-old Laad Lohar who now resides in the village of Ramnagar, Udaipur, is a descendant of the clan. Though Laad was always keen on learning and wanted to go to a school, her family was not supportive of the idea, mainly owing to the onset of her menstrual cycle. As time went by, she realised that she missed her calling. That’s when Laad decided to prevent such incidents from recurring within her community.

She started spreading awareness about menstrual hygiene among girls in her village and also figured out a cost-effective way to make reusable sanitary pads using cotton and banana fibre. That is not all.

Laad kicked off her initiative ‘Kamakhya’ to ensure the self-sufficiency of women during their periods. In the last nine years, she has trained more than 500 women to produce their own sanitary napkins.

This Pune Plogger is leading the way in promoting cleanliness

Waste management needs to be addressed in various urban areas, where not only the civic bodies but citizens are held responsible to ensure that waste is disposed of in the right way. Twenty-four-year-old Vivek Gaurav from Pune decided to take matters into his own hands by dealing with waste with the help of plogging.

Just like jogging, Vivek organises plogging, a technique where runners collect trash on their run. It all started in 2019 when Vivek, a software engineer by profession undertook ten plogging drives.

(Edited by Saheli Sen Gupta)

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