Vacationing youths to rebuild school

singapore — Twenty Indian-origin youths in Singapore are gearing up to spend their three-week vacation this month in Punjab to help rebuild a village school as part of their social work, a media report said on Sunday.

Aged between 18 and 21 years, they hail from different ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds and will live with the locals in Ratokke village in Punjab’s Sangrur district as they paint and renovate rundown schools from December 9.

The programme has shaped up under Project ‘Khwaish’, an initiative of the Young Sikh Association (YSA), a non-profit organisation founded by Satwant Singh in Singapore, The Sunday Times reported.

“At Ratokke, these students will be building a library and stocking it with 3,000 books, installing a water filtration system to ensure clean water there and reconstructing the school’s mouldy and dilapidated toilets,” Singh said.

“They will also distribute stationery to students and clothes as well as other necessities to poor villagers,” he added.

Project Khwaish is the flagship programme of the YSA which was started in 2003.

The YSA takes cue from the Youth Expedition Project, a service-learning programme which sets out to nurture confident and socially-conscious young people, said Singh, a lawyer who has been doing community service for 20 years. — PTI