Five CoEP girls bring their ‘Safe touch and Unsafe touch’ project to sensitise and educate kids

Pune: The child abuse issue was taken a notch higher at with a recent initiative by a group of five girls, Ruchita Kale, Surbhi Rahangdale, Visakha Gayakwad, Mayuri Deshmukh and Neha Wahane in their native village of Shegaon. 
Under the leadership of Neha, the team participated in ‘Ignited Innovators of India’ an effort undertaken by CoEP across all engineering institutes in Maharashtra. 
They contributed an innovative project called ‘Safe touch and Unsafe touch’ which was conducted in several schools at Shegaon.
‘Safe touch and Unsafe touch’ is an awareness programme about child abuse, under which the girls visited the various schools with their creative presentation alerting the school kids about the sensitivity of the issue. In a playful manner, full of activities these young social messiahs approached the kids aged between 3 to 10, and informed them how to react to any kind of physical advance and also alerted them which kind of touch is good, neutral or bad. 
Following which, the enlightened children further approached these girls and told them about their various experiences. One particular incident turned out to be of importance where they found out a school bus’s conductor was being abusive. On alerting higher authorities, an immediate action was taken against the conductor.
CoEP’s initiative is to bring this noble project to the city to spread awareness and more than anything to convert emotions into actions as justifies, Sanjay Inamdar, co-founder of Bhau institution of innovation,entrepreneurship and leadership. “Instead of complaining and merely expressing anger, our endeavour is to take some strong actions and it begins right here with enlightening the children.”