- Students build a park for slum kids using alternative building materials
- Dump yard to playground in 15 days
What students learn in a professional course is typically channelled into the job market.
But when their skills are deployed to give something back to society, magical things happen, as the residents of Fakirpalya slum in Tumakuru city found out recently.
It took a group of 20 architecture students from the Siddaganga Institute of Technology (SIT), Tumakuru, barely 15 days to transform a dump yard into a playground.
Fakirpalya slum has 250 households. The men are daily wage labourers while the women roll beedis to make a living. The only open space in the locality, a 20 ft by 30 ft plot of land, was being used as a rubbish dump. The children played on the street.
The SIT students decided that for their project work, they would convert this plot into a children’s park, ‘Namma Angala’. “The biggest challenge was to convince the slum residents. It was a private plot. They feared that the land would be taken over by the government,” said T.S. Sagar, Associate Professor, Department of Architecture, SIT. It took the students five days to persuade the owner to let them build the playground.
The next challenge was funding. Setting up a park with a playground could cost ₹1 lakh or more. But the students kept the costs down to Rs 16,000 by working with discarded concrete pipes, tyres, saris, bamboo mats, unused bricks, manufactured sand, and other waste material.
They made a game of Chowka Bara (a local version of the Indian Ludo) on a stone slab, a cave from concrete pipes that they painted in bright colours, and a shelter where women could sit and keep an eye on the children. They built swings from tyres and wooden slabs, and a slide using plastic.
“The children joined us in painting the pipe and tyres,” Mr. Sagar said. Arfan, a Class 2 student, said: “I like to sit on the jhula and go into the cave to play hide-and-seek. I also bring my friends to the playground.”
Courtesy: The Hindu
