Yugratna Srivastava (13), a class IX student of St. Fidelis College, Lucknow (estb. 1977), is still basking in the afterglow of her address to the plenary session of the United Nations Summit on Climate Change convened in New York between September 19-25.
The audience of over 100 world leaders included US President Barack Obama, China’s President Hu Jintao, India’s external affairs minister S.M. Krishna and UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon. A representative of Tarunmitra (‘Friend of Trees’), an organisation active in 1,600 schools and colleges across India, Yugratna was chosen to speak on behalf of the world’s three billion child and youth population after she attended the Tunza International Youth Confer-ence (a global youth forum of the United Nations Environment Programme), in Norway last year. It was there that she was selected through a competitive process from among 1,200 delegates.
With her American-accented Sept-ember 22 speech to the star-studded plenary session, which received wide coverage on national television news channels and the print media, Yugratna struck a responsive chord within the country. “The Himalayas are melting, polar bears are dying, two of every five people don’t have access to clean drinking water, the Earth’s temperature is increasing, we are losing the untapped information and potential of plant species, Pacific’s water level has risen. Is this what we are going to hand over to our future generations? Please... no!...” she said, concluding with Mahatma Gandhi’s words: “The Earth has enough to satisfy everyone’s need but not everyone’s greed.”
The only child of Alok Kumar and Dr. Roshni Srivastava, a botany teacher with a Ph D in zoology, Yugratna’s interest in eco protection was born out of an anti-plastics campaign initiated by her school two years ago. “We received a very beautiful planet from our ancestors. It was green; now we have damaged it, polluted it, and we’re going to give it to our successors. This isn’t right,” she said in a message to prime minister Manmohan Singh and environment minister Jairam Ramesh.
A minor celebrity in Lucknow for the forthrightness with which she took the mightiest to task for environment degradation and climate change, Yugratna is still not settled on her career path. However, topping her immediate agenda is a proposal to plant one billion trees in India, part of a UN campaign to plant 10 billion trees around the world. “Whatever I choose to do professi-onally, it will help to heal rather than hurt the environment,” she says with steely determination.
Vidya Pandit (Lucknow)
Life savers quartet
Four young life savers — Tarun Murugesh, a final year undergraduate student of business adminis-tration at Loyola College, Chennai; Vishak Vishwanathan, a class XI student of Bhavan’s Rajaji Vidyashram, Chennai; Aditya Vangala, a third year engineering student of RMK Engineering College, Chennai and Demedu Chodipalli, a professional lifesaver from Vishaka-patnam — whose mission is to rescue people from drowning, represented India at the Commonwealth Lifesaving Championships 2009 held in Edmonton, Canada from June12-14. There they gave good account of themselves bagging eight gold, six silver and six bronze medals in team and individual events.
The Commonwealth Lifesaving Championships are hosted every alternate year since 1991 to advance the mission of the Royal Life Saving Society (Commonwealth) and the International Life Saving Federation (ILS), i.e promoting lifesaving sports education, first aid techniques and offering competitive opportunities to participant countries. The medals-hauling Indian quartet are members of The Rashtriya Life Saving Society (India) which was established in Pune in 1998 as an affiliate of ILS and RLSS (C). “Competing at the international level is a testing exercise as lifesaving sports are relatively new to India. But we had the advantage of novelty and enthusiasm. It was an educative experience and has prepared us for the Commonwealth Rescue Games which India will be hosting in 2011,” says Murugesh.
Typically, excepting Chodipalli who was sponsored for the games by the RLSS (I) management committee and other well wishers, the other lifesavers representing India had to bear their own travel expenses to Edmonton to participate in the championships. Their agility and endurance won them four golds in the obstacle and four in the medley relays, four silver medals in the simulated emergency rescue competition and six bronze and two silver medals in individual events.
Although winning laurels for India in competitive meets is high on the foursome’s agenda, they are more con-cerned about propagating the mission of RLSS (I) and training young people in the art of saving the estimated 100,000 Indians who drown in lakes, rivers and the sea annually. “Our aim is to spread safety consciousness by providing trained lifeguards for major beaches. We are also trying to persuade schools to make life saving training compulsory for students,” says Vangala.
Speed to your fins!
Hemalatha Raghupathi (Chennai)