The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : Educational society pleased with donated furniture

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Wednesday, Aug 29, 2007
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Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

Educational society pleased with donated furniture

Staff Reporter

Rotary Club of Tokyo-Shinjuku collected used desks and chairs from schools in Japan and shipped them to India

— Photo: S. Thanthoni

Gesture: Consul-General of Japan Kazuo Minagawa hands over a map of the schools in Japan that donated furniture to Chennai schools to Gopalapuram Educational Society vice-president R. Ranga Rao at a function in Chennai on Tuesday.

CHENNAI: For people like R. Ranga Rao, vice president, Gopalapuram Educational Society, the gift of furniture from the Rotary Club was just the thing needed to keep children happy.

“You should have seen the children’s faces when they sat in the chairs. They had been sitting on the floor,” he told a gathering of Rotarians, chaired by Japanese Consul-General Kazuo Minagawa here on Tuesday. “Our corpus is low and the students come from very poor families. We have built more classrooms, as every year 100 students join our schools. But, we are unable to provide infrastructure like tables and chairs.”

The Rotary Club of Tokyo-Shinjuku, Japan, had collected used desks and chairs from over 20 primary and high schools run by the government and shipped them to India. The Gopalapuram Educational Society was one of the beneficiary organisations that were gifted the furniture by the Japanese Rotary members to Chennai schools recently.

The 80-year-old society manages three schools – a primary school, a girls’ high school and a higher secondary school. The primary and the girls’ school are feeder schools for the higher secondary school. The school’s pass percentage was now 92 per cent, and in the coming year it was aiming for a 100 per cent result, Mr. Rao said.

Mr. Minagawa praised India’s prowess in the field of information technology. “The donation is to the future Indian brains. This donation is significant because this year is the 50th anniversary of the friendship between Japan and India. Ours was a poor countryside [school] but we had chairs and tables though they often contained graffiti,” he said, handing over to Mr. Ranga Rao a map of the various schools around Tokyo from which the furniture was collected.

The State Government was also involved in providing furniture, said M. Kutralingam, secretary to the Education Department. It had recently built 12,000 classrooms, and NABARD had provided Rs. 70 crore for furniture, he said.

Office-bearers of the Rotary Club of Chennai Presidency, which distributed the furniture, and Katsumi Shibata, president of the Japanese Rotary Club, spoke.

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