800 notebooks distributed to underprivileged students

Hyderabad: Apart from conducting various programmes to empower children with safety skills, life skills and gender sensitisation, Hyderabad-based NGO Learning Space Foundation also fulfils a few basic needs of underprivileged students.

They conducted gender sensitization programme at Zilla Parishad High School, Attapur and distributed 800 notebooks to about 400 students of grades 6 to 10 at the school. The director of NGO Sevitha said, "After the little interaction we had with the head master of the school, it was disheartening to hear that there is an extreme shortage of notebooks in the school."

Though they receive notebooks from a few donors at the beginning of the academic year, they are sufficient only for the first term and it is a huge struggle to find donations for books in the middle of the academic year.

Majority of the children studying at the government schools belong to low income group families, so parents in most cases cannot afford to spend on notebooks & other stationery for their children. Lack of notebooks for students is attributed as one of the reasons for the dropout rates across our country, she adds.