Waiting for the bus, drenched and shivering, during the worst monsoon they have experienced in their lives, this project was a brainwave born out of pure necessity for the group of students from Canacona¡¯s Satyavati Soiru higher secondary school, who have built from scratch a bus shelter out of discarded plastic bottles near their school in Dapot-Mashem.
After years of waiting for the government to install a shelter at the bus stop to give commuters someplace to duck out of the scorching afternoon sun and monsoon rains, the lanky 16-year-olds decided to take matters into their own hands.
?As science students, they went a step further, by deciding to also make a dent in the plastic pollution menace plaguing the state¡ª their shelter consists of drinking water and soft-drink bottles that were littering their villages.
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¡°This was an opportunity for us to make a statement of protest against the authorities who have failed to build us a bus shelter, as well as to utilise discarded plastic,¡± said Anish Faldesai, one of the students who built the shelter. ¡°We also wanted to spread awareness about the harmful effects of plastic for the environment,¡± said Aloysius Monteiro, another member of the group.
¡°Plastic garbage will reduce only if society at large stopped using and generating it,¡± added Vaibhav Metri, who, along with classmates Vinit Painginkar, Om Powar, Sahil Sudhir and Kanay Velip, participated in the project.
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Science teacher Chandralekha Mestri, under whose guidance the Class XI students have also made pet-bottle shoe racks, chairs and dustbins for their school, apart from the quirky bus stop, said that she and her students noticed that a lot of single-use plastic was being dumped without segregation all around the taluka, and not sent for recycling.?
¡°We decided to create a bus shelter for the students and locals of Dapot by stringing them together, which proved to be a cheap, light and durable building material,¡± she added.
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¡°This also gave students the chance to put to practical use, the theory lessons taught to them in the classroom,¡± she pointed out. When the students¡¯ efforts were brought to the notice of Loleim sarpanch Shailesh Pagi, he said that the road was ¡°likely to be taken up for improvement by the government¡±, and that the students should ¡°take the local authorities¡¯ permission first, for any developmental activities¡±.