Run for girl child's education
CHENNAI: Education of the girl child being the pet project of our Prime Minister, it isn’t surprising that it has the backing of college students, especially in Chennai. The students of MOP Vaishnav College for Women will be conducting ‘Penn Kalvi’, a miniathon (a short-distance run) at Island Grounds on August 7, as a part of the institute’s silver jubilee celebrations.
Students of the media management department have taken up the responsibility of putting together an internal campaign, where they plan to rope in all of its 3,000-plus students for the event. “We have event-related T-shirts that are being sold on the campus. Our students have been running a year-long campaign on our community radio station (CRS) 107.8. On August 7, from 6 am onwards, we have several performances such as street plays, role plays, mimes, dance dramas, etc. There’s even a photography competition for the students,” explains Susan Sridhar, HoD, media management department.
To encourage students to participate in the event, the college is giving cash prizes for the first three places — `5,000, `3,000 and `2,000 respectively. “These prizes are exclusively for our students – more for their efforts than anything else,” she smiles. Students have also created a teaser, which is available on YouTube, and are actively promoting the event on social media (Penn Kalvi on FB) as well.
“It’s not just about creating awareness until August 6. It has to go beyond the event,” points out Upsana Gothi, second year student, media management. She also designed the logo for Penn Kalvi. “Through this event, we want to tell people that education of the girl child should not stop with high school or college. For instance, though I want to study further, my family wants me to get married and settle down. That’s not right.”
The college has partnered with Innovations, an event management firm, to take the cause to a wider audience. “Education of the girl child is a great cause and one of the best ways to create awareness about this is to conduct a marathon. But a marathon could be too long in terms of distance, and may limit the number of participants. That’s why we came up with the ‘miniathon’ — 5 km and 10 km run, so that more people would participate,” says Rajiv Raju, GM, Innovations.