More than a year after Mumbai-based activist, Swati Patil, filed a Public Interest Litigation (PIL), urging the state to reduce the weight of school bags, Rugved Raikwar, a 12-year-old student in Chandrapur is taking the battle into his own hands.
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Raikwar, a 7th standard student of Vidya Niketan School has decided to go on an indefinite hunger strike from October 2, as he feels that the state is not implementing the Government Resolution on reducing the weight of schoolbags.
"This is a problem that all students are facing. Students are juggling school and private coaching. So, the number of books carried by a child and the weight of the bag crosses the permissible limit (10% of a child's body weight). The GR is a good guideline for schools but it has to be implemented properly by pulling up schools that do not comply with its norms," added Raikwar.
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Initially, he sent a letter to the state education department but got no reply. On August 22, he and his friend, Paritosh Dhandekar, held a press conference but even that didn't help. "It seems like I have no option but to take this drastic step. I will be going on a hunger strike till the authorities give me assurance that they will implement their resolution," he added.
While Raikwar's own school assigned lockers to the students recently, he says that the state still needs to solve the issue for the rest of Maharashtra.
"We observed that children in our neighbourhood were not growing as tall as we were supposed to for our age. Later, in a medical camp, a doctor mentioned that a large number of us were hunching because of our bags. This is when I took it up," said Raikwar.
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Nagpur police have currently denied him permission for the hunger strike which he planned to hold at the Sanvidhan Chowk in Nagpur.
Meanwhile, Swati Patil, is collating data for the next hearing of the case in the Bombay High Court. "The education authorities claim that it has reduced the bag weight of nearly 90 per cent of the students and that it has tabulated the data of bags checked per 100 students but the RTI query revealed that only 45-50 bags in some regions were surveyed," she said.