Vedanta’s Child Care Campaign “Khushi” received yet another boost when Rotary International – Udaipur Mewar honoured, the key driver of the Vedanta Khushi campaign Pavan Kaushik, the Head of Corporate Communication in the company on Saturday.

Vedanta’s most popular social media campaign has been gaining momentum and just 2 days back the international athlete and discus throw champion, Krishna Poonia appreciated the campaign and has joined the campaign. Krishna Poonia shall also be spearheading the Vedanta Khushi campaign to create further awareness about the poor and underprivileged children. The campaign launched with the motive to create awareness amongst the common people about care for the underprivileged children in India, has been successful in effectively percolating the first message of “Being polite to the poor children”.

The campaign has been launched with a thought that Government, companies or NGOs cannot do it alone and individuals need to come forward and participate towards this national problem. India is currently passing through a phase where almost 50% of the population is below the adult-hood. Most of these children belong to poor families or underprivileged families and thus these children suffer from malnutrition, lack of health facilities and lack of education. Tomorrow, when these children would grow into adults, with no skills to earn or be productive citizens of the country, the situation is likely to go beyond control.

Prof. I.V. Trivedi, the Vice chancellor of Sukhadia University, Udaipur, and the Chief Guest of the Award Ceremony, was particularly impressed by the way the passion has been involved in the campaign. He said it is important for the younger generation to come forward and deal with national problems with head-on.

While receiving the award from Prof. I.V. Trivedi, Pavan narrated the beginning of campaign as how Group Chairman Mr. Anil Agarwal was keen to spread the message of awareness through social media, when the Group is fully involved in child care projects, through adoption of child care centres, towards bringing India closer to a position where no child in the country remains malnourished.

Pavan informed that the campaign that was started with just 7 people got tremendous support from people from all walks of life, particularly the educated slot, who understood the problem and were with suggestions to deal with it.

“The campaign “Vedanta Khushi” is a non-funding campaign that encourages people to come forward and understand the problem and take individual steps for the probable solutions. And this is what makes it different from any other social media campaign on community service, where most of the campaigns on social media demand donations” said Mr. Hansraj Chaudhary the Patron and Past Governor of the Rotary Club.

Today, Vedanta Khushi has grown to about 23,000 members and the blog is touching 50,000 page views. Those who are attached with the campaign include professors, teachers, doctors, engineers, entrepreneurs, college students, management graduates, journalists, social workers, NGOs, and other opinion makers.

Post launching of campaign, some of the tangible steps taken by people include sponsoring education of children of the people who work in their houses. Some members have employed parents of children who beg on the streets or traffic-lights. Some have gone for adoption. Some have come forward in educating the street children in their spare time. Some are engaged regularly in providing medical check-ups and nutrition to these children and some are contributing in any social activity that is related to the development of these children. There are many companies who have been taking care of underprivileged children in their own way. People are joining and the message is spreading.

The campaign is gaining momentum. There have been over 70 posts on the Vedanta khushi blog which highlights participation by individuals towards the cause. The real-life stories on the blog are motivating others to give similar contribution.

Pavan says, in India if we take a meager figure of about 1 crore rich families, they must be employing at least 2-3 helps and even if they take care of the children of these people, we are addressing a significant portion of this problem.

With time there has been need to discuss critical issues and the “Khushi” platform brought in those issues for discussions and debates. Some of the issues like problems relating to education for street children, menace of child beggary, increasing drop-out in rural schools, infrastructure in rural schools, problem of children involved in making crackers, teachers problem in rural schools etc..

The company Vedanta is contributing in its own way. To address the poor infrastructure in rural govt. Schools the company adopted 92 schools. The company is already looking after over 5,000 child care centres (Anganwadi Centres) in Rajasthan, Orissa, Chattisgarh and Karnataka by way of providing supplementary diet, regular health check-ups of the children.

These children are being taught through play-way method to keep the interests alive. There has been a considerable change in their health, weight and knowledge. Recently, 9,000 such children have been sent to formal schools and 100 tribal children have also been graduated to formal schools, which was a dream for them.

Keeping the problem of children of migratory parents, Vedanta got associated with a local NGO in Tamil Nadu and able to provide help to 700 children of migratory parents who have come for work in Nilgiri area. “Khushi” also tied up for the free lip cleft and palate operations for 2500 children with Smile Train organization of US and American GBH Hospital in Udaipur. 80 operations have already been executed successfully. The average spent by a patient on such operation is about Rs. 12-15,000, which now would be done free of cost.

The company has constructed 8 hi-tech mid-day mean kitchens – 6 in Rajasthan, 1 in Chattisgarh and 1 in Orissa which are being run in association with State Governments and are providing hot mid-day meal to about 250,000 rural poor children every day covering about 2700 schools. With largest children population in the world, larger than China, and almost 1/3rd of world’s malnourished children in the world living in India alone, the country is indeed in an alarming situation today.

8 million children in India, in the age group of 5-14 years are engaged in work. If we go by UNICEF report, India also has about 11 million street children and metros are leading these figures, with Delhi housing over 100,000 such children alone. 20% of the child deaths in the world happen in India. India also has 2nd largest educational system in the world. Though, with a total enrollment of 114.6 million at primary and 41.3 million at upper primary level schools, India has shown remarkable improvement in the education enrollment scorecard. But when it comes to sustaining it, the country’s biggest challenge is increasing number of children who drop out from the school. This population was as huge as 8.1 million in 2008. Worse is out of 8.1 million children more than 2/3rd are girls.

We need to get to the bottom of the problem to resolve the issues. It is time to wake up and make a conscious effort to ensure a bright future for millions of these underprivileged children in India. Individual efforts is what the country requires today.

Pavan says, “if you go back to your home or office and speak about the purpose of Vedanta Khushi objective, the purpose of the campaign is achieved. People are very educated and they just need to know this issue.

Also present on the occasion were KHUSHI team members, Pradhuman Solanki, Pranav Jain and Shivnarayan Maurya. From Rotary Nirmal Singhvi, Yogesh Pagaria, the President and Anil Mehta Secretary were also present.