Sowing green dreams
Posted 16 July 2011, by Sandeep Dua, The Times of India (Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd), articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com
LUDHIANA: Twenty-year-old Gurmehar Singh and Amrit Pal Singh Dhillon, along with their friends, Gagandeep Singh Dhillon and Avninder Singh Khangura, both 21, have inspired many a youth and even several villagers to undertake environment-saving initiatives so as to maintain the beauty of Mother earth.
Third year civil engineering students at Guru Nanak Dev Engineering College (GNE College), they love environmental depiction photography, web-designing and computer-aided design ( CAD) and have volunteered to make Gill village as country’s first village to be mapped via Global Positioning system ( GPS). Apart from this, they have been planting around 500 saplings every season for the past two years at their hometowns and keeping water-pitchers for birds in summers at roof-tops. They also encourage their family members and friends to adopt such practices to help nature.
The four friends motivated students and staff of GNE College for such initiatives, the result of which was, direct massive plantation of 1600 saplings this year. District forest office provides free saplings to these youths, who also encouraged residents of Jassowal, Alamghir and Gill villages to change all 800 tubelights to CFLs, saving energy every month. Not only this, their example encouraged people to plant more than 2000 saplings in these villages. The youth said that when they started the initative to create awareness among people, many of their mates and residents used to make fun of them. These four, however, were determined to do something for the society and ignored the criticism. Gradually, people started supporting their campaign.
The four youngsters feel if people around the world start initiatives like these, future generations will have a better place to live in. They said every house can save around Rs 100 a year per bulb if everyone changes lighting system of their homes and make them energy-efficient in whatever ways they can. The next in line for these inspiring youths is massive installation of groundwater recharge and rainwater harvesting systems at their hometowns and college by next year.
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