Through Animals' eyes

“When we want to see a sustainable change, we invest our future generations in the process”

After hours of discussions and respectful disagreements, the students of class 8 and 9 of PKEGMS Akansha shortlisted 77 problems as the most pressing ones in our society. Amongst these, when asked to vote for the one closest to their hearts, almost unanimously, Animal Abuse was picked.

We then came to the part of “how” to approach animal abuse in a social sector. This is where the children were guided through the design thinking process where they went step by step from ideation to problem solving.

They set out to understand the exact issues leading to animal abuse in the neigbourhoods of Mundhwa, Koregaon park and Keshav nagar by conducting over 500 surveys, containing simple and straight forward questions regarding street animals and abuse of animals.

The children furthered their knowledge by creating pie-charts and bar graphs to observe trends within these neighbourhoods.

They then sat together for the next set of discussions on possible next actions to form solutions for the problems they had observed. Some of the solutions that the children have ideated and successfully executed include street plays in crowded and important area in these neighborhoods to increase and sensitize people about abuse of street animals, coded and reflective collars for dogs in these areas to keep a track of the population and health, visit to blue cross to understand their working and receive feedback on the project, foldable shelters for animals that can be dismantled and assembled at will. These will be placed in the territories of street dogs to provide shelter during rainy and cold days. The children have also planned to adopt a street as per their convenience and feed the puppies and dogs there with any leftover food they may have for the day. Furthermore, the children have designed posters that show simple steps for the general public on behavior around dogs so that their fear of these animals may reduce. These pamphlets will be circulated by the children along with the daily newspapers that go to homes.