Over the next eight months, Class VIII students of five Corporation schools in the city will learn the basics of civic administration and how they could play a role in solving civic issues. And helping them in the exercise will be Janaagraha Centre for Citizenship and Democracy, a Bengaluru-based non-government organisation, through its Bala Janaagraha programme.
Corporation Commissioner K. Vijayakarthikeyan said that he wanted to take the programme to Corporation school students after seeing students of a private school in the city do well in the Bala Janaagraha programme.
Introductory session
K. Sunitha, Manager – Bala Janaagraha, said that the Friday’s session at the Corporation was an introductory one for a few students and teachers.
The representatives from the five selected schools would go back to start the 24-session programmes of 40 minutes each in their classrooms.
In the first few sessions, the teachers would train students through demonstrations and role play the basics of civic administration.
To enable this, the school managements would allot a session (period) a week. Thereafter, the students would take up a project – the responsibility to solve a local problem they think is important and needs to be addressed.
Aiding the students in the project will be Janaagraha’s local volunteers.
Thereafter the students would document their achievements and compete in various levels with students from other schools across 20 cities where Janaagraha was conducting the Bala Janaagraha programme. Thus far, the NGO had worked with 40,000 students from 527 schools in more than 10 States.
Mr. Vijayakarthikeyan said that the students will put to use the knowledge they are going to gain to see if they can solve a few civic problems. He urged them to make good use of the opportunity.
M. Nandhagopal, a student of the Coimbatore Corporation High School in Selvapuram, said that he was excited to learn about local governance to bring about a positive transformation in his neighbourhood.
