A 17-year-old student has initiated a crowd-funding campaign for 15 students of a Dharavi school, to get them tablets for online education. Aria Gupta, mentor to the students in the Sri Sri Ravishankar Vidya Mandir (SSRVM), aims to raise funds of Rs 1.50 lakh through crowd-funding platform impactguru. The contributions have made up almost 80% of the target amount.

A Std XII student from Aditya Birla World Academy, Aria started mentoring children from SSRVM in 2018 in Robotics. While teaching them she realised poverty and illiteracy are two sides of the same coin. “For years I had long conversations with each of the students about their lives, struggles and surroundings. I came to understand that education is still a privilege to a lot of students. They are extremely driven, motivated but some just don’t have resources. During the lockdown many of the student’s parents were at home and they managed to attend classes through their mobile phones. Now everything has opened up, their parents are going to their work places with their mobile phones and the students don’t have a device to connect online,” she said.