Behala: School gives taste of ‘self-reliance’ to its pupils

KOLKATA: Seven students of Barisha Janakalyan Vidyapith for Girls in Behala treated their mothers with a gala dinner at a restaurant through their hard-earned money, thanks to a unique entrepreneurship project conceived by the school that has shown the way to the girls to be self-reliant.

The school had hand-held its students to churn out a plethora of handmade items on their own and provided them a platform for selling these at a twoday ‘Janakalyan Shilpodyog Mela’ at the school ground in January. The school authorities had provided a token amount to the students of each class – from class V till XI and with the consent of the guardians and the managing committee, they were made to sign a contract paper on November 16 last year, that the token amount that has been provided to them will be returned back to the school authorities through the sale proceeds of the handmade items. The extra money earned from the sale would be retained by the students. A few days back, the teachers counted the sale proceeds of the fair and handed over the extra money earned by the participating students to them.

“Each of the classes had different ideas of spending the money. However, the most unique one came from the class XI girls who said that they want to take their mothers for dinner. Majority of our 250 odd students of our school being first generation learners, their mothers hardly get opportunity to go for such social gathering. The girls have realised this and so they decided to opt for such way of spending their hard-earned money. Human values are an intrinsic part of education and this gesture showed that we have achieved success in inculcating good values among our students,” Sharmila Sengupta, headmistress of the school said. Sengupta posted the pictures of her little entrepreneurs – Chumki Mondal, Soheli Sarder, Sahina Khatun, Arpita Guha, Diya Mondal, Madhumita Pohan and Susmita Sapui along with their mothers.