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UDAIPUR: Vedanta’s “Khushi” campaign is a mission driven by the vision of Mr. Anil Agarwal, Chairman – Vedanta Group’s that “no child in India should remain malnourished and be deprived of education and primary health. Let India be a child malnourished free nation.” Join “Khushi” and raise your voice and concern towards child care in India.
India, a country with largest child population, largest malnourished children, largest child deaths, and largest street children in the world, put our minds and thoughts in a thinking-hat mode. For once, we felt apprehensive about building India for a bright and progressive future. It was sure, government, NGOs, corporates alone cannot bring this problem to a solution and common masses need to align and join on such national missions.
This is where we decided to launch an awareness campaign “Khushi”, which was aimed to spread the message of care for the underprivileged children and building a life of dignity for them. The message was clear that about 50% of India’s child population needs attention – attention towards their nutrition, education and good health. The message was also clear that without the involvement of similar minds, India would never be able to make it to a developed nation.
On this thought, on 10th April 2012, Vedanta Group launched “Khushi”, on blog and on the Facebook. We also decided to make “Khushi” a 100% non-funding campaign that would strongly engage with people and spread awareness to encourage them to take individual steps and initiatives towards child care.
Where the blog, www.khushi-creatinghappiness.
The debates have also become a platform for knowledge sharing and a guiding factor for proposed actions. Taking forward the outcomes from debates, Vedanta adopted 112 schools in Rajasthan for completely changing their infrastructure, study material and other facilities.
To further strengthen the objective of “Khushi”, 75 child care centres have been adopted in Tamil Nadu, Odisha, Rajasthan and Chattisgarh. These centres have about 2500 deprived and underprivileged children. These children are provided daily nutritious breakfast, lunch, books and primary health check-ups.
Vedanta “Khushi” also spent days with the street children to understand their issues and problems. Accordingly, workshops were conducted to inculcate the importance of education, health and hygiene, nutrition and behaviour change.
Recently, Vedanta’s “Khushi” came together with NDTV for the girl child campaign – Our Girls Our Pride. The campaign ambassador was the gorgeous bollywood film actress Ms. Priyanka Chopra. Ms. Krishna Poonia, the Padamshree, and the ace international athlete also became joined “Khushi” campaign.
Today, when we are about to complete 2 years in this mission (10th April 2014), we are quite pleased that we are able to communicate our message clearly to a number of opinion makers which include journalists, professors, engineers, social workers, bureaucrats, students, doctors, management graduates, entrepreneurs, etc.
Vedanta “Khushi” has become a global mission and there has been increasing interest from Indians living in different parts of the world. People are engaged and spreading message of child care through direct engagement with people and also through their social media presence.
One thing we could successfully bring forward through “Khushi” has been change in the behaviour of people towards deprived children.
Vedanta “Khushi” is growing every day and so changing the society.
Vedanta as a group has worked so far with 14,000 child care centres in India – in the state of Rajasthan, Karnataka, Chattisgarh, and Odisha, reaching out to more than 500,000 deprived and underprivileged children, since 2008.
Taking cognizance of the issue, Government of India has sanctioned Rs. 129,000 crore in the current plan to be spent under the Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS) within 3 years.
