Student initiative fights filth

Group of students from city college goes beyond their course project to raise awareness against littering.

Barely ten days since its creation, Sweep The Sin: An Anti-Litter Initiative page on Facebook has already received over 900 likes.

What started off as a humble group project by a bunch of students from St Andrew’s College, Bandra, is slowly expanding to become a dedicated awareness campaign against littering in public spaces.

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“As part of our media planning course, each group of students has to carry out a month-long campaign on a social cause. We chose to deal with the issue of littering because it’s rampant in our city. Even though the course requires us to create minimal campaigning tools like one viral video, online activity on two forums and two events aimed at spreading awareness, we decided to try and extend it so that it really helps the cause,” says Arundhati Chatterjee, a TYBMM student.

So, she and group mates Neil Athayde, Aashna Peddiraju, Brinda Mehta and Urvi Rathod also created a YouTube channel.

Their first upload is a quirky video, which adapts the doctrine of original sin to indicate how the first act of littering started when Eve discarded the apple after biting it.

It boasts of 145 views since last week.
On their Facebook page, the group has compiled under an album named Litterati, images that overwhelm you about the filth spread around. Sweep The Sin is also active on Twitter, blogger and Flickr.

So even while the course allows them to wrap up their projects mid-September, Arundhati and her gang plan not to hang up their boots, “We want to make it into a sustained campaign that we hope, makes at least a slight impact,” she says.