Clean Drinking Water For School Children

Here’s how your CSR Funding can help the children of Bandhwadi Inter Government School in Gurgaon harvest rainwater and get access to clean drinking water.

This cause is featured on Fund My Project as part of CSRlive.in‘s collaboration with BitGiving.com

Project by: ELNA

Location: Gurgaon, NCR

Category: Eligible CSR activity as per Companies Act 2013, Schedule VII

(i) …promoting preventive health care... and making available safe drinking water

(iv) ensuring environmental sustainability, ecological balance,... conservation of natural resources and maintaining quality of soil, air and water;

Funding Required: INR 55,000

Why Fund this Project?

Right to safe, hygienic drinking water is a fundamental right of every Indian citizen. However not every citizen has access to it. The problem becomes really acute in Gurgaon with most of the available water being hard and not potable. And this becomes a crime when little children are exposed to such water and consume it daily without even knowing how badly it is affecting them! Safe, clean drinking water should not only be the privilege of the rich and us as the more fortunate, privileged class should be the ones to take the first step in preventing that from happening. A critical concern is the salinity of the water as well as very high fluoride content in ground water due to the rock and water interaction happening on way to aquifer.

The Proposed Project: As the first logical step in this direction was the empowerment of these children with the right knowledge around hygiene and sanitation, ELNA undertook it as a project at Bandhwadi Inter Government School in Gurgaon in 2015. This school is situated in the Tehsil Sohna, Gurgaon District of Haryana State on the Aravallis. Gurgaon District is the second most exploited district of Haryana when it comes to ground water recharging; Sohna tehsil is the most exploited in Gurgaon. The only source of potable water in this village (and school) is ground water via hand pumps and few bore wells in affluent households.

ELNA's last project in this school on hygiene and sanitation lasted 3 months, at the end of which these children performed a ‘Nukkad Natak’ (a first for them, completely scripted and performed by students of classes 6-8) on the virtues of keeping their surroundings clean and maintaining self hygiene at the basic level. But while they learned a better, safer way of living, it also dawned upon the folks at ELNA that just the theory will not be of any help to these children who had limited resources to improve their lot.

During the course of this project, children were taught that ‘Rain Water Harvesting’ was the best and most cost effective solution for them. And soon enough a few of these kids approached their principal and ELNA with a proposal to develop Rain Water Harvesting recharge pit at their school this year.

No more lip service!

These children have realized that they were consuming hazardous water till now and have come forward with a plea for helping them better their condition. This is a test where if we as the affluent, privileged society fail them, then they will lose all faith in our intentions of trying to make a difference. In future they will dismiss all such efforts as mere lip service from their rich neighbors.

What they really need, in addition to the knowledge which empowers them, is support in getting access to a safe way of life! The curiosity and trust of these little minds is asking for answers. Let us not fail them. Let us join hands in giving the precious gift of safe water to these children and recharge this valuable resource for mother Earth!

What will these funds be used for?

ELNA needs approximately Rs 50000 more to create the recharge pits, since the terrain is hard rock in this region.