See the India of tomorrow

BANGALORE: India’s largest essay-writing competition for school children is back with more fervor and enthusiasm. The Tata group announces the launch of the sixth edition of Tata Building India School Essay Competition, a national-level contest in eight languages that is expected to attract over 2 million students from 5,500 schools across 150 cities. The languages include English, Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Tamil, Marathi, Kannada and Oriya. The theme for this year’s competition is ‘Clean and Green Nation’ and young minds will be encouraged to share their thoughts on this topic. Started in 2006 as an English-language essay competition, the Tata Building India School Essay Competition is being organized every year to encourage young minds to think about issues connected with nation building.The English edition of the competition is planned to reach 1.2 million students from around 2,000 English-medium schools spread across 54 cities. Hindi essay competition will be held in Hindi medium schools of 27 cities in North and Central India, while other six language competitions will be conducted in separate language medium schools in 12-14 cities each in relevant States. The major cities include Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Pune, Indore, Goa, Nagpur, Bhopal, Vadodara, Nasik, Jabalpur, Raipur (Durg), Hyderabad, Bangalore, Chennai, Manipal, Coimbatore, Cochin, Trivandrum, Vijaywada, Madurai, Vizag, Hubli, Pondicherry, Kozhikode (Calicut), Delhi, Jaipur, Shimla, Lucknow, NCR - Gurgaon /Faridabad, Ludhiana, Allahabad, Jammu, Udaipur, Varanasi, Amritsar, Ajmer, Kanpur, Chandigarh, Jaipur, Kolkata, Jamshedpur,Darjeeling, Bhubaneshwar, Patna, Guwahati, Siliguri/Durgapur, Ranchi, Cuttack, Shilong, Gangtok, Dhanbad, Rourkela and Agartala/Itanagar.Speaking about the competition,  Atul Agrawal, Vice President, Corporate Affairs, Tata Services, said “Tata Building India School Essay competition is a unique initiative that encourages students to pen down their thoughts on how would they like to see India of tomorrow. The overwhelming response over the years has encouraged us to continuously expand this initiative pan-India across multiple languages and help instill positive values of nation building among young minds”.The Tata Building India School Essay Competition will be a two-phase activity in the participating schools. The first phase consists of the screening of an inspirational film as stimulus for the young minds, to get them thinking and to bring a greater focus to the subject. As part of this stimulus, a Tata-themed documentary film will be screened at the schools. The documentary this year is Speak for the Earth, which details the varied efforts of Tata companies to help preserve the planet. This will be accompanied by an audiovisual on Tata Building India. Followed by the screening, students will be asked to write an essay on the given topic of nation building. The 2011-12 competition is starting from Mumbai and then moving on to other cities.