Driving home a point

Now, schoolchildren join the Car-Free Thursday initiative with the ‘One Lakh hands’ campaign

The “Car-Free Thursdays” initiative is growing bigger with each passing day. The initiative, which aims to reduce the number of cars on the city’s roads, has now started a new campaign called the “One lakh hands initiative”. As part of the campaign, volunteers are going to various schools and collecting signatures from students for a Car-Free Thursday.

“We just started the campaign and have been to eight schools and collected 6,500 signatures. The aim is to go to 100 schools in the city,” says Vishala Reddy, founder and director of Identcity, who designed the campaign.

Why is it aimed at children? “Children are the ones who will be suffering in the coming years if we don’t take a step today. In fact, a recent study in New Delhi showed how 75 per cent of children’s lung problems were because of air pollution caused mostly by vehicles,” she says.

As a part of the campaign, a child is given a letter which is addressed to an IT employee and they are free to write their own reasons regarding traffic issues and how to solve them, which sometimes has been – “Just walk”.

“Apart from the letter, which we will distribute in the IT area, there will be one addressed to the parents of the child. There will be a pledge, which the parents can send back to the school. So just through one child’s letter we are letting so many others know about the issue,” says Vishala.

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