By IANS
Bargarh : All the students of a school in an Orissa village have been spending a part of their pocket money for the past four years to build a statue of Mahatma Gandhi in front of their school.
The unveiling of the statue on Gandhi’s birth anniversary on Oct 2 is a dream come true for the students of the government upper primary school in Haldipali village, about 370 km from the state capital Bhubaneswar.
The school provides education to about 50 children from class one to five.
Since the inception of the school in 1957, students and teachers have been regularly singing Ram Dhun at the beginning of the classes but since there was no Gandhi idol in the school, they would treat a stone as Bapu’s idol.
For the past four years they had been collecting one rupee each from every student at the beginning of a month to build the statue.
Initially, the villagers were not aware of the children’s initiative. When they came to know about it, they decided to support them.
An artiste from a neighbouring village built the statue using cement, mosaic, white powder, gum and colour.
“We are happy that the statue will be inaugurated on Oct 2,” Sonic Sahu, a class four student of the school said.
“The total money spent on the statue would be about 10,000 and more than 70 percent of the money was collected by the school children. Moreover, the artiste who made the statue did not take any remuneration,” schoolteacher Prashant Dash said.