MYSORE BANK CIRCLE:For over a year now, Youth For Privarthan (YFP), an NGO of around 1,000 members and volunteers, have been painting the town red, literally.
Nearly every weekend, the group, mostly consisting of students, tidies up a spot in Bengaluru — litter-picking, scrubbing and repainting the walls and sometimes cleaning up drains and installing benches.
Last Sunday, the group revisited a spot that they had cleaned up nearly a year ago. “Posters had covered the walls there once more,” says Amith Amarnath, President of YFP and a law student under Christ University. “We have been thinking of fixing it once more for a few months now.”
While the BBMP and residents take the initiative to maintain the spots after a cleaning drive in most areas, here they are not as pro-active, he adds. “We also think they are a little helpless because there are all these groups that call themselves pro-Kannada organisations that put up the posters,” he explains. “So as a social experiment, we’ve painted the wall in the Karnataka Flag colours, instead of our usual terracotta.”
In an earlier ‘social experiment’, the group, after cleaning up VV Puram’s Food Street last November, stood with placards with messages directed at the vendors who people it that read, ‘If you want to throw garbage, throw it at me.’
Another spot that the NGO plans to go back to is on Bannerghatta Road, near Sagar Apollo Hospital. “We will probably do that a couple of months later, since we have other spots scheduled before that.”
Of late, the traffic accidents caused by broken medians has inspired the 14-month-old group to focus on repairing them. “We also want to pick a government school in Bengaluru Central and volunteer to teach students spoken English or whatever other interests they might have once a week,” Amarnath says.