Hygiene for kitchens: Kharghar college students paint their canteen clean

What is the regular look of your college canteen? Unclean tables, chairs of pale colours, an overflowing dustbin in a corner and walls full of cobwebs. Isn’t it a very boring atmosphere for such a happening place like canteen?

It is this point that struck the students of Bharati Vidyapeeth College of Architecture, Kharghar, who decided to give their canteen a new, vibrant and colourful look.

Bharati Vidyapeeth, Kharghar, has different colleges like of engineering, architecture and dental within its campus which share one canteen. The architecture students who redid their canteen are now even willing to do the same elsewhere. 

Omkar Jagdale, an architecture student from the college said, “While the canteen was to be redeveloped, we painted the canteen walls and made some changes to the regular atmosphere.” 

Jagdale explained, “We do keep expecting from the food servers to take care of hygiene. But there is also some contribution from students’ side for the unhygienic conditions of the canteen. This is because the canteen is never seen as a classy place like any outside food restaurant, where you take care of all these things.

Now after reworking on it, the canteen just looks like any other happening eating joint, where even youngsters tend to keep a level of sophistication.”

Under the guidance of their professor, Gulshan Gufran, it took the 25 students three days and nights of hard work to transform their
canteen.

According to information provided by Gurfan, it was found that, on an average, every student spends one hour per day in canteen and that amounts to 300 hours in a year. “We thought of re-imaging our very own canteen, to give it a new life, a soul, an image that every student will remember once he graduates. A place that resembles joy, spirit of youth, cheerfulness, happiness, humour as well as fun and learning through display of art and creative ideas,” said Gurfan.

Chinmay Shetty, a student Bharati Vidyapeeth’s Engineering college who was eating at the canteen with his friends said, “The canteen makes us feel proud of our college. Now we feel so good to eat at this canteen that nobody would want to make it look unclean, untidy or dirty for it will destroy the classy image of it.”

John Nadar, another student from the architecture college said, “Looking and the response that we are getting, we are soon to open a Facebook page where we will give guidance to other college students who want to make their canteen a better experience to eat at. We are also thinking of doing such work at other colleges if there are opportunities.”