The Hindu : Karnataka / Bangalore News : A noteworthy effort for children's sake

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Jun 16, 2004

Karnataka

Karnataka - Bangalore

A noteworthy effort for children's sake

By Govind D. Belgaumkar

Will institutions emulate Bangalore's Widia Poornaprajna School in making school bags lighter? — Photo: K. Murali Kumar

BANGALORE, JUNE 15. The Widia Poornaprajna School (WPPS) on Tumkur Road here has managed to reduce, for some of its students, the burden of heavy school bags. By introducing a new system for taking down notes, it has right away brought down the weight of the school bags of first and second standard students of the institution by over 50 per cent.

About 160 students of the two classes no longer carry notebooks to school. They take a file containing a few single-line and four-line sheets, specially printed and supplied by the school, instead of six 200-page notebooks that children normally carry. Each notebook weighs 250 gm, which means that the children's burden has been reduced by 1.5 kg. In addition, a couple of books which the children used to bring earlier are now kept in the school, reducing the weight of their school bags by about 300 gm.

The changeover to the system is the idea of N.K. Murthy, who is in charge of the school. Mr. Murthy, who first saw it working in the U.S., was pained to see children carrying heavy bags to school; in addition to six notebooks, they took to school three or four textbooks, a diary, a slate, a few chalk pieces, and even a duster, which all added up to over 3.5 kg. The Hindu weighed the books and other articles a first-standard student of the WPPS carries on a typical day: they were 1.75 kg.

Mr. Murthy said the school needed the cooperation of parents to implement the new system. The parents should remove the sheets from the file when their children come home, sort them, and put them in the respective subject files. A meeting was held to explain the system to the parents.

K.S. Sridhar, Principal, primary and high school sections, was worried that the children might find it difficult to adjust to the new system. He was concerned that they might misplace the sheets. But Shantala, Head Mistress of the primary section, said the children and the parents had quickly adjusted to the system and there was no problem in implementing it. "It is working just fine," she said.

Mr. Murthy was happy that the new system was making parents give more attention to what their children were doing at the school. "Now they will know the performance of their wards better," he said. Besides, he expected that the children would know the importance of being systematic. "They will be a little more disciplined in life," he hoped.

Since the Government is planning to reduce the size of textbooks from next year, one could expect the weight of school bags of the WPPS students to come down further. A parent pointed out that a campaign launched years ago by late R.K. Narayanan through his impressive speech in Parliament on the burden of school bags was being carried forward. Last year, a city school started providing locker facility to students in an effort to reduce the weight of their school bags.

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