Our Executive Director’s latest article has been published in Vijay Karnataka, addressing a critical yet often overlooked gap in child safety: the “Grey Period.” The article focuses on the vulnerable hours between the end of the school day and the time parents return home from work, arguing that physical infrastructure like CCTV is no substitute for active community engagement.
Transforming Schools into Safe Community Hubs
In this thought-provoking piece, Dr. Basavaraju R. Shrestha highlights that child safety is at its lowest during the late afternoon hours. He notes that vacant school premises often become magnets for anti-social activities, leaving children who linger there—or wander the streets—at high risk.
To counter this, Dr. Shrestha proposes the ‘Sandhya Shale’ (Evening School) model. Instead of locking school gates at 4:00 PM, he envisions turning them into vibrant community hubs. By hosting supervised sports, cultural programs, and Foundational Literacy and Numeracy (FLN) activities, we can transform these “risky hours” into productive ones. This approach leverages “Positive Deviance”—filling a space with so much positive energy and community presence that negative elements are naturally displaced. It is a call to move beyond passive surveillance and toward a collective, community-led shield for our children.
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