The Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University, Hyderabad has taken up a unique initiative of promoting education by distributing one lakh notebooks to the students in government schools in the State.
The initiative is unique in the sense that the notebooks are being made from the leftover plain papers of examination scripts of the thousands of students of the university. The programme took off at the Government High School near Raj Bhavan where JNTUH Vice Chancellor A. Venugopal Reddy distributed the notebooks.
Prof. Reddy told The Hindu that thousands of scripts go waste every year with lot of students abstaining from the exams for various reasons. Similarly, about 5% of students don’t write more than one paper. So instead of damaging the scripts the varsity decided to make notebooks with the unused papers in the script.
“We preserve the confidential information on the first page and the remaining is used,” he said. Notebooks are manufactured in the university press itself and the NSS unit is roped in to distribute them in government schools. What makes the notebooks more interesting is that each note book also has information about career opportunities after 10th Standard and Intermediate courses apart from motivational pictures of prominent people like former president A.P.J Abdul Kalam.
The Vice-Chancellor spoke to the children during the distribution and recalled his school days at government school, Old city. N. Yadaiah, Registrar; Kamakshi Prasad, Director Evaluation,JNTU and NSS Programme Coordinator P. Sammulal were also present.