Umang Bansal and Dimple Singh are the fellows at Youth Leaders for Clear Air Fellowship by Clean Air Fund in the collaboration with Pravah.
Here, Umang and Dimple are sharing their story of being a part of this prestigious fellowship and designing and executing their unique Social Action Project to address Delhi’s acute air pollution problem.
Their efforts are actively bringing substantive changes in the lives of the residents of Delhi and empowering them to take meaningful action towards a cleaner, greener Delhi.
Go on and read how their story inspires you(th) to take action because the time is now!
How did you come to know about the fellowship?
We got to know about this fellowship or the initiative towards Clean Air from a common friend of ours who has been a SMILE Fellow at Pravah.
What inspired you to take up this fellowship?
We both are the volunteer at Robin Hood Army too, it’s a volunteer organization that works to serve food to hungry citizens from there we get more motivated towards society and get to know how difficult life is.
Moreover, we both were engaged with some more social activities and in that time we found Air Pollution is a major problem for all yet it is something underrated among ourselves. And when we get to know that Pravah provides a platform to express ourselves and to work on our Social Action Project, it excites us to do something good for society.
What is the most pressing concern with respect to Air Pollution in Delhi?
The most pressing concern is it is ignored by many of the citizens and it is limelight when something bad happens. Also, people are something hypocrites on this topic as we have seen some people talk about its causes and they know how harmful it is yet at the same time they do something that is not good for the environment.
We believe to advocate and educate people about air pollution and let them know how significant it is. And it will be helpful for us to clean our air.
What problems does your project solve? Briefly describe your efforts to address the issue.
So as we highlight earlier too, we are more focusing on educating people regarding this issue. Our project more involves educating and building a structure in our community so that they can take care of the area and have some responsibility and probably it helps us to make something good out of it.
Which SDG(s) is your project directly addressing?
- Good Health and Wellbeing
- Clean Water and Sanitation
- Sustainable Cities and Communities
What motivates you to work towards the long term sustainability of the environment?
As we see high development took place around ourselves but we (the humans) highly neglect the sustainability or the perks that the environment is providing us. As the year passes, the effect we create in the environment is get more negative and it highly affects our health too.
We all have the environment and its effects in our school syllabus but that’s only in the books, we don’t follow it in our daily lives. So we have to follow them and also work on individual and in society so that the next generation would get a clean and pure environment.
What impact have you affected or plan to achieve?
We see if we are able to educate a large number of people from our community, then definitely it will get a good for this cause. We will able to make a chain of people and this will amplify our work and people will more attract towards the environment.
Also, we have seen our work is amplified by them only to another community and they are also doing it for the sake of it. Really good to see people understand their responsibility towards the environment.
What challenges did you face during the journey? How did you overcome them?
Challenges are part of life. From Day 1 till now, we have faced a lot of challenges in our projects. From surveying our community to reaching out to officials to amplify our work. But our determination toward this cause is able to tackle all the problems and makes us easy to contribute to this cause.
We get a good mentorship through our facilitator and guests in Pravah, they set a better example of learning from practical examples.
What are the skills and values that you acquired during the fellowship?
We can say from the point of view of skills, we get a lot of learnings from this fellowship. We can’t even give them words, the ability to understand the people taking consider the facts, making fit us in a different environment and make society listen to your voice, convince officials on the major problems that society faces and so on.
We wholeheartedly thank the whole team of Pravah behind this fellowship to get these skills and learnings scout to form ourselves and take them into work.
How can people reading this contribute to your project or cause?
We would urge people to contribute to this social cause. We hope you all are internet freaks, that’s why reading our article, wanted to thank and at the same time urge you to take small actions and make this in your lifestyle.
Make this understanding to your connections and amplify your knowledge, especially that for a good cause to as many people as you can.
How can others follow in your footsteps towards sustainability?
Make sustainability your part of life. Agree to this or not, but you will definitely be the one who will make a major impact on society. Remember it, one and one make the society.
Take your first step towards the environment, and you will see people are actively following you and you will get the utmost satisfaction in doing so.
We at Young Influx would like to take this opportunity to thank Dimple and Umang for taking a leap of faith and sharing their impeccable story with us. We appreciate their efforts and are pleased to bring out their story to a climate-conscious audience.
And hello, dear readers, we welcome you to explore our platform. Give yourself a chance to be illuminated by a varied range of stories of other young people. Read more such stories here!
