Sign up for afaqs! Newsletters
HT reaches out to over 1 million underprivileged children through its 'You Read, They Learn' initiative.
The company claims to have reached over one million underprivileged children in Delhi-NCR in a day's time through beginner's text books printed in the Delhi-NCR edition of HT last weekend (April 18). Every page of the English newspaper included a page of a textbook and readers were encouraged to cut out the pages, staple them together to form a textbook and share it with an underprivileged child. In addition, there were textbooks inserted in copies of Mint and Hindustan circulated in the region.
To promote the activity, HT Media is running a multimedia campaign including television, cinema, radio, internet and outdoor, which will come into play at various phases of the campaign.
In addition to the monetary contribution, the campaign will receive editorial support, too. The reporters of HT will dig out stories of change, of people making a difference and of readers' contributions to the lives of the underprivileged children.
To start with, the initiative has been planned for one year. The money collected from the sales of the copies in Delhi-NCR will be handed over to its partnering NGOs including Pratham Delhi Education Initiative and Child Rights and You (CRY), to be put towards their primary education initiatives. Going forward, the company plans to engage with other NGO partners working in this space.
In an official communiqué, Sanjoy Narayan, editor-in-chief, Hindustan Times, says, "The text book is one of our initiatives to help readers join the 'You Read, They Learn' campaign by sharing it with needy children or even using it to help someone learn the alphabet."
For the record, HT Media publishes Hindustan Times (English daily), Hindustan (Hindi daily, through its subsidiary HMVL) and Mint (business daily). The company also has four FM radio stations in Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru and Kolkata under the brand Fever 104 FM.