Do you remember your last day at school? It usually ended with children tearing up last year’s notebooks. Under their Kora Kagaz (blank paper), a bunch of former students of Chinmaya Vidyalaya Chennai are collecting blank pages from used notebooks to reduce the carbon footprint of schools while supporting the less fortunate.
Gaurav Khemka reminisces the beginning of their journey. “Kora Kagaz as an idea came about as a part of a Teen of the Year competition in 2010. The competition required a participant to come up with an idea under the topic Habitat. Brainstorming with friends and family made us realise that there is a lot of unused paper left in notebooks that could be used to make a difference, albeit a small one, in the lives of a few children.”
The original team of seven—Shreya Prakash, Shraavan Ravindranath, Yash Jain, Summit Agarwal, Darshan Khicha, Khyati Patel and Gaurav Khemka—thought that this would be a good way to spend the summer. Their first project in their school was a hit. Then, Kora Kagaz really took off when they won third place in NDTV Greenathon, an environment initiative, in 2012. Soon, the team started collaborating with other schools and apartment buildings.
“The idea is simple. We contact schools and take permission to collect notebooks, unused paper and used paper from these institutions,” says Vanshika Bagdy of Kora Kagaz. “Volunteers segregate the paper according to size and type, after which it is segregated. Unused paper is sent for binding, while the used paper is sold to kabadiwalas for recycling. The money from selling funds the binding of the former lot.” Kora Kagaz then distributes the ‘new’ notebooks to schools with limited resources for free. Their distribution has ebbed and flowed with the lowest being 82 books in 2014 and 2,000 this year.
“For us, growth has happened by enabling an organic mix of the original team being a guiding force and also by passing on the baton to those interested in taking it forward,” says Khemka. “We have managed to survive all these years, and now it’s up to the current front-runners (Shilpa Suresh and Vanshika Bagdy) to pass it on.” He adds that they are looking to set up independent, self-sustaining chapters in schools, colleges, offices, residential complexes, etc. and conduct small competitions and drives regularly. They last conducted a collection drive in a leading apartment in the city on March 6.
For students who have moved on to pursue their dreams and ambitions, Kora Kagaz still remains a passion. “Every part of the process creates its own memories, but nothing is as memorable as the book distribution,” says Khemka. “In one of our repeat distributions in a village near Madurantakam, a man showed us a book he had made from his old notebooks, and that’s when we realised how simple this idea is.”
For those of us who wonder what ‘we’ as ordinary citizens can do, this blank paper could just be the inspiration.