THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The young environmental zealots were penning away diligently their concerns for mother nature even while a JCB was tearing away at the gates of Students’ Centre, PMG, to make room for the increasing traffic. Inside the campus was going on the Environmental Arts Festival, a first-of-its-kind initiative in the State, organised by Gandhian Studies Centre, University of Kerala.The four-day festival, that began on Wednesday, has a plethora of programmes, including essay writing, poetry writing, extempore, group song and dance, quiz and folk song contests that will have ecology and environmental protection as their theme. Said J M Rahim, co-ordinator, Gandhian Studies Centre, “The festival is a precursor to the State-level environmental summit to be organised by the Centre from August 3 to 5.‘‘It will have the participation of school and college students, teachers and the general public, apart from academics and researchers and subject experts. Unlike the ivory tower conferences and seminars, the summit will see a large-scale involvement of the general public. ‘‘Paper presentations and other programmes will be organised in every district as part of the summit.” On the first day of the festival, school and college students took part in essay writing competitions, which had topics like ‘Sustainable development’ and ‘Killers called pesticides’. Children from lower primary classes wrote poems on ‘The music of wilderness’, while representatives of all the five groups participated in the quiz competition. Painting contests were held in the evening. The Noor-ul Islam group of institutions and NIMS Medicity have extended their help to the Centre in organising the festival.
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