Delhiites donate 1,39,000 books for underprivileged

Residents and school children of Delhi and NCR have come forth and contributed a whopping 1,39,780 textbooks and storybooks for children, as part of Hindustan Times’ Bag of Books initiative.

Residents and school children of Delhi and NCR have come forth and contributed a whopping 1,39,780 textbooks and storybooks for children, as part of Hindustan Times’ Bag of Books initiative.

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Bag of Books is a book-collection drive that is part of HT’s ‘You Read, They Learn’ initiative, which has already helped send 3,245 underprivileged children to school.

As part of the drive, residents of Delhi and NCR were invited to give their old books a new lease of life by donating them to underprivileged children.

Thousands of school children and parents came forth to fill the ‘bag of books’ between August 2 and 16. HT PACE, an HT school newspaper and education programme, had placed book collection boxes in nearly 100 schools of Delhi and NCR.

A second leg of the drive was held at Select Citywalk mall in Saket between August 17 and 23 to allow the general public to contribute as well. The collected books will be distributed through partner NGO Goonj.

“The response from schools and individuals has been overwhelming. We will certainly ensure that these books reach deserving kids, for whom these books will be precious,” said Anshu Gupta, founder-director, Goonj.

Annapoorna Sehgal, head-education, HT Media Ltd, said, “I would like to thank principals of participating schools for their enthusiastic and wholehearted support in making the ‘Bag of Books’ activity such a grand success. The response from schools was tremendous with many more wanting to participate in the drive. As we go forward with the ‘You Read, They Learn’ programme, I look forward to schools partnering with HT in all the other activities as well.”

The ‘You Read, They Learn’ initiative was launched in April, to help educate underprivileged children.

As part of this initiative, HT has been contributing a part of the cover price of every Metro copy of the newspaper towards creating a corpus to fund the education of over 10,000 children during the year.