Pension via drones, mobile creches for migrant children, and residential school for tribal students: Our top social stories

Meet Saroj Devi Agrawal, the sarpanch of Bhaleswar gram panchayat in Nuapada district in Odisha who is walking the talk. The 55-year-old has introduced a slew of initiatives, including disbursing pensions and medicines via drones, a bartan bank, and taking governance to the doorstep. Agrawal has been active in local governance for over 20 years. She was deputy sarpanch and councillor becoming taking over as a sarpanch two years ago.

After taking charge, Agrawal came to know that senior citizens and disabled people in Bhuktapada, a tribal village, were not receiving their pension on time. The village was mired in poverty and disconnected from other parts of the region as it did not have proper roads. Agrawal and other members disbursed disability pensions and distributed medicines in Bhutkapada village via a drone. 

Read more about her story here.

Daycare centres for children of migrant workers

Tara Mobile Creches was initially founded by Meera Mahadevan in 1969 in Delhi when she saw the plight of children in construction sites. Later, in 1980, Sindhutai Sawardekar established its Pune branch.

However, in 2007, all the branches became independent entities for ease of work and management. It runs daycare centres in Pune for the children of migrant workers, near construction sites, offering food, education and healthcare facilities.

Currently, these centres are located in 15 areas across Pune. Once construction is over in a particular site, the daycare centre moves to another place where the next job starts. 

School for tribal students

In a remote village in the district of Mandla in Madhya Pradesh—about three hours away from Jabalpur—stands Riverside Natural School. The residential school, started by Priya Nadkarni and Digvijay Singh in 2016, is home to over 300 tribal students. It offers education, shelter, and nutrition and trains the students in football, farming, and technology.

Besides the usual subjects like Maths, Hindi, Science, etc., the Riverside Natural School focuses on three key areas—football, farming, and technology—and students from Class 6 onwards can specialise in them.

Nadkarni explains that the residential school, which follows the curriculum set by the Madhya Pradesh Board of Secondary Education, aims to foster all-round development and help the students in securing better career opportunities. 

In other positive news…

The gift of hair

A few years ago, Haripriya, a native of Chhangarh village in Khurda district, was moved by the plight of a few underprivileged women fighting cancer. They had lost all their hair because of the side effects of chemotherapy.

According to a report in The New Indian Express, Haripriya wanted to help these women in whatever they could. She decided to donate her hair to make wigs. She also motivated other women to do so for cancer patients who could not afford expensive wigs.

Haripriya launched the ‘Mission Smile for the Cancer Fighters’ and became the first donor of the initiative in 2021. Now working as a cluster coordinator for JAGA Mission under the Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation (BMC), she tonsured her head and donated waist-length hair to the Tata Memorial Cancer Hospital in Mumbai, with the help of the Madat Charitable Trust.

The report added that in the last two years, she and her team of 10 volunteers under the Social Organisation for Professional Volunteer Action (SOPVA) have mobilised 150 persons, both women, men, and children of not just Odisha but also neighbouring Jharkhand, to donate hair for the cause. The youngest one among them is six-year-old Anya Sharma of Jharkhand.