A youth campaign running across 15 Indian cities reached Shillong last week, reports Rajiv Roy
A YOUTH campaign titled “In Our Hands” conducted by IDFC (Industrial Development Finance Corporation) Foundation, Mumbai reached Shillong last week at the city-based Women’s College. Currently running in more than 300 colleges in 15 Indian cities, it plans to connect about a million youth in the next three years. In the Shillong finals, 24 colleges with 2000 students participated.
This year the theme of IOH is ‘Environment & Sustainability’ which covers three major environment issues – carbon foot print, land and water. Lady Keane College, St Anthony’s College, St Edmund’s College, St Mary’s College, Union Christian College, Shillong College and other top colleges participated in the preliminary rounds.
IOH is an initiative by IDFC, to empower the youth of India and is committed to creating awareness about the current social, infrastructural and environmental challenges and actively exploring opportunities to address them. It is an opportunity to make the development debate more inclusive by ensuring deeper youth engagement.
Through this youth connect campaign, IDFC endeavoured to bring the perspectives/opinions of youth to decision makers and simultaneously increase awareness of the deep and systemic challenges that India is facing. This year, the IOH initiative encourages emerging India (youth) to build an opinion around key issues, confronting infrastructure development by leveraging digital forms of communication through competitions such as viral video, online essay competitions, blogging contests etc. and various on-ground initiatives like quiz, debate and recycled art competitions.
Arun Raste, head of brand and corporate communications, IDFC Ltd, said, “We are conducting this event for the past three years now under corporate social responsibility choosing contemporary topics by policy experts and resource persons in that particular project and present it to the Government of India in our annual IDFC – India Infrastructure Report. But keeping it that way we thought that the younger generation will not be aware about what is happening. We then spoke to students and got the feedback that academic competitions like quiz, debate, panel discussions, blogging etc. in which the youths are attracted, talk and read about will create awareness. And from this year we have made it a competition with students in the age group of 17 to 22 years.”
He added that the winners here will compete with the finalists of the 14 other cities and the all India winners will later participate in the panel discussion at the launch of IDFC – India Infrastructure report in presence of bureaucrats, political and business leaders in Mumbai later this year in the grand finale.
In order to choose topics Raste said that IDFC has spoken and taken feedbacks from experts, academicians and others which have an appeal and local in nature. “So this year, we have chosen environment and sustainability to let students debate and quiz about the local factors like pollution, mining etc. and we have got some interesting takes by students on these issues here,” he said.
The campaign featured several inter-collegiate competitions and activities including student city journalist, debates, panel discussions, documentary making, online essay competitions, photography contests, painting and blogging contests etc. on the theme. Each city has an NGO participating that provided volunteering opportunities. There were also kiosks to educate students on carbon footprints. Each year the cause changes and each year IDFC enhance the scale of this competition to reach wider spectrum of youth.
Informing that the IDFC is an organization of many firsts in the field of equity principles, environment impact assessment and sustainable development to minimize the risk or replenish, Raste said that the first edition on this initiative was held only in Mumbai. The competition was adjudged by Edward Thama, who runs an NGO besides Diya Rathod, advocate and Raste. Saurav Shome Choudhury and Prantoo Saikia of St Edmund’s College whereas Rajiv Kumar Sharma and Santosh Sharma of BBS College emerged winners of the debate and quiz competition, respectively whereas Ivaleen Mary Mawkon of Shillong Commerce College won the painting/ art competition.
Last year, the IOH campaign went to five cities and generated an overwhelming response – reaching almost 20,000 students across 90 colleges on ground and an online campaign engaging over 70,000 young people. “We see the youth as change agents who have the energy, passion and creativity to make a significant contribution to society. In conjunction with the firm’s constant endeavor towards building community engagement in India, this year we intend to bring in a new dimension to this campaign through an online volunteering exchange platform for the youth on our IOH Website. We hope this platform will enable willing volunteers to identify and engage with their favored cause through the registered list of NGO’s on our website,” said Raste. IDFC is a financial service institution with a special focus on infrastructure and national development. It is also working with the government of Meghalaya in the field of bureaucrat capacity building through public – private partnership.