by BIS Correspondent
LATUR, JULY 20, 2017: What do most engineering students do after a gruelling round of semester exams? Relax and chill out, you would say. True. But for Kaustubh Morye, 
Sagar Mhashelkar, Vishal Manikades, Nitin Bohra, Shantanu Tekade, Ambesh Singh, all third year engineering students from Don Bosco Institute of Technology (DBIT), Kurla - it was different.
They volunteered to respond to an appeal from Latur district to conduct english speaking and personality development programmes in five zilla parishad rural schools from June 20 to 28.
The school children had a marathi medium background, so the objective was to help them reflect on the importance of english as well as to motivate and expose them to the english language.
Using games, class room sessions, action songs, competitions as the play-way method, the volunteers got the eighth, ninth and tenth standard children to engage in english. The motive behind this programme was to encourage students to converse in english and overcome their fear, build confidence and support their effort at spoken english.
Principals and teachers of the schools supported the initiative and allowed the volunteers to extend their sessions as much as they wanted. It was observed that the young students' confidence increased and they took a liking to conversing in english.
This engagement of city engineering students with rural children brought home a few realities to the DBIT students too, as they understood that despite their limited resources, the children from rural schools were determined to attend school and to dream big.
The programme was coordinated and conducted under the guidance of Royal D'souza, NSS head, DBIT Kurla, Father Anthony Santarita, Don Bosco Tech School project director and Kiran Patange, district coordinator – RMSA Project. The Don Bosco Tech trainers Chetan, Ganesh, Sonali and Omkar also helped in the endeavour.