Building trust with Trustore'

Kozhikode: A school at Mukkam here runs a store for students based purely on trust. It wants its students to be true to themselves, value the properties and to respect the belongings of others. The Caliph School of Integrated Studies, a residential school run by a non-profit organisation Caliph World Foundations at Mukkam, has been successfully running the 'Trustore' on the campus for the last six months to teach them moral values. There is no staff member or a camera to supervise the students.

They can take any item from the store, drop the amount in the box and take their exact balance from it without anyone managing the sales.

The school management's aim is to improve the character of the students. Principal A.K. Ismail Wafa told DC "the concept of 'Trustore' came from the realisation that our education is worthless if we can't even trust our students."

The profit of the store is not transferred to the management but used for student union activities and charity. Muhammad Thahir Thayyib, student union chairman, told DC, "the Trustore has never suffered any loss, but we believe the profit cannot be measured in monetary terms because the values we imbibed through this are immeasurable."

The school has transformed the students to responsible individuals through various programmes. "In the initial days, the students had spoiled the school properties by defacing them, but when good training and new sets of properties were given, they changed their behaviour," said Amjad Wafa, a teacher and a member of the school management.