Techies’ move to turn govt schools into gardens of smiles for children

Hyderabad: Numerous government schools in the city are struggling with various issues, including inadequate nutritious mid-day meals and poorly lit classrooms. So to ensure the children have access to better facilities and also intake proper healthy meals, on humanitarian grounds, a few IT employees and voluntary organisations have planned to renovate the schools. They have also come up with the initiative of a community garden that will become self-sufficient in meeting the grocery requirement for mid-day meals.

With a mission to provide healthy meals to government schools and in an initial stage, these good samaritans have launched this community gardening initiative at Government High School, Mallapur.

Manoj Vidiyala, co-founder of Dha3R NGO, said, “Along with good quality education and proper intake of a nutritious meal, safe drinking water and sanitation are the basic needs in every school. Unfortunately, many government schools across Telangana face inadequate sanitation facilities, and the midday meals served are lacking in proper nutrition. Some meal suppliers have reportedly reduced the vegetable portions due to factors like rising costs and limited availability. So with the help of around 100 IT employees, we have come up with community gardening, where organic vegetables will be gowned in the school premises and once yielded, that can be used in cooking the meals.”

“In the third week of September, we have started this gardening. Around 20 varieties of organic vegetables, including beans, potatoes, and tomatoes, will be grown in a 400-square-yard open plot on the school premises. Initially, we have begun this with a single government school located in Mallapur, and in the coming days there is a plan to expand this initiative to other schools. With this idea, we are trying to motivate and encourage others to adopt this method so that the schools themselves can become self-sufficient in meeting the vegetable requirement in mid-day meals,” he added. “Apart from this, we have renovated the school by repainting the walls and upgrading the washrooms, especially the girls' restroom, which previously only had a top rope but lacked side walls.

We constructed the walls, replaced all the damaged taps, and repaired the drainage pipelines. We initiated this mission with voluntary funds, and a few like-minded volunteers have also supported us,” said another volunteer involved in the initiative.