HYDERABAD: Reading is a habit that everyone should adopt and aiming to raise awareness about it, a unique project — Stories on Wheels by Ananya Polsani, a high schooler is doing the rounds in rural areas of Telangana. This mobile library has various sets of books that can be accessed by the students of government schools when the mobile library visits them.
A small vacation to a village called Kodurupaka in the Karimnagar district of Telangana has inspired the eleventh-grade student Ananya Polsani to take up a community development project. The idea of helping the rural students with the necessary resources happened when she went to visit her grandparents. Ananya’s grandfather suggested that she visit the local government school while she was at their place.
During the interaction with students and teaching staff, she felt that much can be done to enrich the existing potential of the students. The students who were pursuing their education from the government school were as good as the students from an urban school background. They had immense potential and had a lot of aspirations. This made her think in many ways and evoked a strong feeling of doing something which would benefit them. Ananya observed that the school’s overall facilities needed a push.
While she was travelling back to Hyderabad, an idea splashed in her mind. As there are many schools that are in need of these resources, she thought of having a mobile library that could cover multiple schools in rural areas. She has acquired an ambulance, books and sports equipment from donors, and laptops with internet connectivity from a few tech companies.
Ananya is aiming at providing required resources that would help students to pursue other interests apart from studies such as sports, literary activities and e-learning under the same roof. She had done crowdfunding through a third-party website called “Milaap” for the interiors and exteriors of the van. This van intends to help nearly 1500 students with a collection of a thousand books.
Ananya received great support and appreciation from her relatives and friends regarding this initiative. They were very much happy when they first heard this beautiful concept of imparting knowledge to the students of rural areas. It took her about a year to collate all the resources. Stories on Wheels, led by Ananya, is planning a book collection drive in Hyderabad as well in the coming weeks.