Wheels of Joy

Parivartan NGO collects cycles,repairs and donates them to students in rural villages who live far from school

On July 17,Shiva More (name changed),a student of Class VI at New English School,Pasali,was the happiest kid in the world.

Usually,his teachers would scold him for dozing off in class,but now he is the first to raise his hand to answer a question or ask one. The drastic change in him is all thanks to a bicycle he got from the Parivartan NGO. There was nothing fancy about the cycle,but for More there could be nothing better,because it saved him the effort of walking seven km from his home to school every day. Aware of how his parents toiled at a construction site to make ends meet,he thought it would be cruel to ask them for a pair of slippers when his old ones wore out due to the long distances he travelled. The possibility of asking them for a cycle was unthinkable.

At a meeting two months ago,we discussed the problems faced by students in rural schools of Pune district. Infrastructure,quality of teachers,study material and meals offered were secondary; the main issue was how to get the children to come to school. We were not dealing with unwilling parents,but the problem of long distances, says Shashikant Dadaram Devkar,member of Parivartan,an NGO that works for the uplifting of students in rural schools.

While discussing the issue,the idea was floated to collect old and used cycles from Pune and distribute them to needy students in the surrounding villages. We advertised in Marathi newspapers and even gave donors the option of calling us to pick up the used cycles from their homes, says Devkar.

Over a month since the collection drive kicked off,the NGO has collected over 40 cycles to be distributed. Keeping all the cycles in a store house at Nanded Phata,they hired a mechanic to fix them. We paid him as much as any other customer would because we wanted him to do a good job. Many students in rural area have to pass through jungles,riding on kachha roads full of rocks. We had to make sure the cycles are sturdy enough, says Devkar. The first lot was distributed at a school in Pasali,where 11 boys from classes VI to IX,including More,were given cycles.

I chose boys who live the farthest from school to give the cycles. The boys were very happy and surprisingly,the other boys did not sulk that they werent picked. The students have a lot of concern for each other, says Sandhya Kondekar,a member of the school committee.

The donors of the cycles are given a receipt along with a thank you-note from the NGO. When their cycle is donated to a student,the students also write to the donor telling them how useful the cycle has been for them. One of the boys was in tears as he wrote the thank you letter. He was an orphan who lived with his elder brother. He mentioned in the letter that from that day,he would think of the donor also as his elder brother, says Devkar.

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Sharing that this will be an on-going project,he adds that they have decided on four more rural schools where they will be distributing the repaired cycles on August 15.

(To donate a cycle call,Parivartan

NGO 9921941735.)

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