Telenor India Spreads the Joy of Reading amongst Children to Celebrate World Book Day
With a mission of empowering societies, Telenor India spreads the joy of reading amongst children to celebrate ‘World Book Day’. Under the ‘Book for Smiles’ campaign, Telenor collected around 7000 old books from employees and customers by setting up collection boxes across its offices and select Telenor stores. This is the second consecutive year wherein Telenor partnered with the Food 4 Thought Foundation and the books collected will be used to set up 10 new libraries in schools across India. Last year around 23 libraries were set up with the books collected covering 21 government schools and 2 public hospitals across states of Haryana, Delhi, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Madhya Pradesh.
On this occasion, Sharad Mehrotra, Chief Executive Officer at Telenor India said, “Books are considered to be a child’s best friend and through this campaign we aim to spread the joy of reading within children. We strongly believe that every book donated will have an impact on enhancing the literacy levels amongst children and shall further instill the habit of reading which is critical towards acquiring knowledge. This campaign has made accessibility of books easier for children and provides great opportunity to everyone who is willing to contribute in enhancing child education.”
Reading is clearly an integral aspect of a child’s learning journey and in a world dominated by technology and screens, reading is more important than ever as it is the only way for children to relax. The ‘Book for Smiles’ campaign by Telenor is an attempt to spread the joy of reading by bridging the gap between the privileged and not so privileged segment of children in the country.
“Knowledge is the key to create a developed society, as without the enlightened citizens, the future is bleak. Our children need a reading revolution; a revolution that we intend to fuel by giving our children an access to books. We are proud to have the support of Telenor in this journey and we are thankful to them to continue this campaign from last year which saw a great success. We are eager to spread the same level of excitement this year as well,” said Madhavi Sharma, Director, Food 4 Thought Foundation.
Telenor has always aligned its efforts towards bringing equality in the society. In addition to their pocket friendly products, the company has also been active on the social front by coming up with various awareness programs, especially to spread awareness amongst the children in India. Webwise was one of the key programs, where workshops are being conducted across schools to spread awareness amongst the young students on how to be safe online. ‘Book for Smiles’ is another initiative by Telenor to ensure that the underprivileged students in India have equal access to reading and do not see it as a luxury but their right.
About Telenor India
Telenor (India) Communications is a mobile telecom operator offering most affordable and value for money prepaid voice and data services in India. It is a wholly owned company of the Norway-based Telenor Group. Telenor India has commercial operations in UP (West), UP (East), Bihar (including Jharkhand), Andhra Pradesh (including Telangana), Maharashtra (including Goa) and Gujarat. In the areas where it operates, Telenor is the fourth largest operator both in revenue and customer market share. Telenor has positioned itself as a ‘full paisa vasool’ operator and has over 53 million subscriptions from the six circles.
For more information, please visit www.telenor.in/about-us.
About Food 4 Thought Foundation
Food 4 Thought Foundation is a social enterprise established in 2015, with a belief of ‘Connecting Idle Books to Hungry Minds’ and fulfilling every book lover wish and request of ‘Just one more page please’. Food 4 Thought Foundation believes and focuses on the 3 major sector of Education, Children and Arts & Publishing. The flagship focus areas of the foundation are #Build & Operate Libraries, #Activate idle books through collection drives, #Encourage Reading Habits through Joy of Reading and #Save endangered stories & folklore by digitizing them. Currently it operates 51 Libraries, 20430 books, 5200 Children, Spread across 10 States and 13 Cities and continuing to add another 50 libraries in next 2 months and spread joy of reading among 200 children.
For more information, please visit www.food4thoughtfoundation.org.
