On April 3, 2018, Navaagat, a promising young non-profit NGO completely run by college students, launched their latest and probably most ambitious project till date – Project Swachhta – that aims to beautify slums around the city. The project was executed by starting with the Okhla industrial area slum in South Delhi by getting the appropriate permissions from the dwellers. Team Navaagat painted the walls and cleaned the area around the slum. The plan was simple, yet elegant: create a positive environment for the residents by making the slums better places to live in which will foster growth and motivate the people.
Apart from painting the slum and cleaning the streets, Team Navaagat planted saplings and installed dustbins around the area to make the atmosphere healthy. This project attracted enthusiastic volunteers from all across the city, including the Department of Management Studies, Ramanujan College, which also helped in backing up the project. Also, the talented students from Croydon – the fine- arts society of the IP College for Women painted beautiful graffiti over the walls which really aided Project Swachhta.
The day-long project was just the beginning of a dream that was in the works for a long time. The president of Navaagat and a student of the Vivekananda Institute of Professional Studies (VIPS), Abhishek Jain, said, “An environment conducive to living healthy is a fundamental need of every human being. We realised that many people are not privileged enough to have access to the same and Navaagat wanted to work in the direction.” This project aims to create large-scale impact by making a model of beautification and hygiene that can be applied to different slums worldwide.
You can check out more of their ground-breaking projects on their website: www.navaagat.org
