IIT-Gn Students Decides To Hold Weekly Sessions with Labourers’ Kids

Gujarat: Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar (IIT-Gn) students as well as faculty members has decided to hold weekly two-hour sessions – Nyasa- with the children of construction workers on the campus. Assistant professor of Chemical Engineering Mukta Tripathy has said they came up with the idea after seeing the children playing near their shacks while their parents worked, from 8 am to 6 pm, at the unfinished buildings nearby.

As per sources, after a successful first session this weekend, on Sunday i.e. on February 27, 2011, nearly 15 students and faculty spent a couple of hours with about 40 such children, mostly aged between 3 and 8, in one of the lecture halls, playing with alphabet blocks, drawing, painting and sharing stories. In total, there are some 400 such workers on the campus, employed to build various structures like laboratories and hostel buildings at the institute’s temporary campus, currently, shared with the Vishwakarma Government Engineering College (VGEC) at Chankheda.

Furthermore, Professor Tripathy has said that the only time the women seem to spend time with the children during the day is one-hour lunch break when they come and feed them. He said that the children usually never approach us during the day, maybe because they were afraid of being shunned. But when it got dark, they would come up to us and beg. He also added that they don’t seem to be attending any school. Most of the laborers being from Gujarat’s eastern tribal belt and IIT-Gn having a large population of non-Gujarati students and faculty, informal courses on Gujarati are also being mulled so they could communicate with the children better.