Iconic paint manufacturer Shalimar Paints in association with Raah Foundation for enlightening lives recently facilitated the launch of “Project Suraksha”.
This is a unique campaign aimed at spreading awareness about COVID-19 and its prevention measures across slum areas in the form of community wall paintings.
The campaign was kicked off at Dallupura, New Delhi by volunteer painters. This initiative will take place in other locations in Delhi NCR over the next few weeks.
The volunteer artists created numerous wall paintings near slums in Dallupura at some of the prominent locations such as school, community central board office, police station, etc. These wall paintings displayed messages of how to prevent oneself from Coronavirus, the dos and don’ts, the importance of social distancing, wearing masks, and so on.
These messages were in the form of graphics and in colloquial language which would be easy to interpret by all socioeconomic groups. Besides the murals, the initiative also plans to add numbers of various helplines on the walls which the residents can use in case of emergencies with assistance of government officials.
Raah foundation for enlightening lives is already working with informal workers in the urban settlements in Delhi. This initiative has been introduced to provide opportunity to the painters from the community to come forward and help them generating their livelihood by painting the walls.
Raah Foundation for enlightening lives is a Not-for-Profit organization, established in 2017, with an idea of ensuring gender inclusiveness, creating equitable society with special focus on engaging men as key component to ensure Women Empowerment. Raah Foundation has been extensively working towards community welfare and development and has framed its programs in accordance to the needs of the community, following the principles of Education, Entrepreneurship, Environment, Economic Empowerment and Equality.
According to Meenu Sharma, the Co-founder of Raah Foundation for enlightening lives, “The rhetoric amidst covid-19 of slum dwellers is excruciating. Substandard housing, packed settlement, common toilets & thronging people makes social distancing a far-fetched dream. Rapid spread of this novel coronavirus has made practices like hand washing, wearing a mask and physical distancing an integral part of daily life. Hence, we initiated project “Suraksha” with Shalimar Paints with an aim to spread awareness to contain spread of this lethal virus by painting slum walls. A picture paints a thousand words and will act as a daily reminder to every passer-by. Simply put, we see it is one interesting way to make the walls speak and create awareness”.
Dwelling on the initiative, Minal Srivastava, Vice President – Marketing, Shalimar Paints, said, “With the help of this initiative we just want to help create constant reminders on ways to combat this virus and pandemic. While the fear around this is very real but at times, it also creates unnecessary panic and we lose focus on what we should be working towards. I hope these reminders help in reinforcing a few simple things that are within our control in the fight against this disease. The category that we work in fortunately has the capability to help in this- so we are trying to contribute in whatever way we can”.
