CHENNAI: On a bright early morning, recently, a large group of people gathered on the Marina for the second edition of ‘Eureka Run 4 Children’, a five kilometre run, to create awareness and raise funds for the cause of quality education in rural areas.Eureka Child Foundation an initiative of AID India, helps improve the quality of education children receive, by conducting after-school training programmes. They are now functioning in around 1,000 villages, where each village has three centres. These centres function with the help of village volunteers who are trained by the foundation and provided with all the materials necessary. The need for quality education was highlighted by the secretary of the Eureka Foundation, Balaji Sampath, who said, “Today in Tamil Nadu, almost all children in the villages go to school, but almost 50 per cent of them cannot read or subtract. For these children from the poorest of society, quality education may make the difference between a lifetime of poverty and a new life full of hope.” The run was flagged off by Dr Vasanthi Devi, former Vice-Chancellor of Manonmaniam Sundaranar University and Dr M Jayaraman, Secretary of the State Human Rights Commission. More than 3,000 people had registered and over 1,500 of them turned up for the event. Selva Ganapathy, a volunteer with the organisation, said, “We hope to raise awareness about the need for quality education for poor children. The funds raised through this run will be used for the SuperKidz project in the villages.”Employees of 35 different corporate companies like Michelin, Ford, Idea, Cognizant, IBM and TCS, and 10 different colleges including IIT-M, MOP Vaishnav, Stella Maris and Ethiraj, participated in the run. The Loyola Institute of Business Administration (LIBA) worked in association with Eureka to organise the event.The participants had to pay a registration fee of `250, which would go towards the fund, that will over 60,000 children who are enrolled in the programme.
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