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A documentary titled 'The Spirit of the Ganga' would be screened on Sunday to launch a campaign for raising awareness about Ganga pollution and driving the youth and community into action, besides active river clean up drives.
The documentarywill be screened for a select audience which will include former Secretary, Ministry of Jal Shakti, and current Secretary, Ministry of Textiles, U.P. Singh, and Director General, National Mission for Clean Ganga, Rajiv Mishra. The crowd-funded film is a result of the zeal of an 18-year-old and his volunteers who travelled across the Ganga and conducted several programmes involving the community with a focus on Gangetic dolphins. Sumair Handa Bakshi, the young mind behind the 'The Spirit of The Ganga', is the founder of 'Save the Spirit of the Sea Foundation', and is now on a mission to work on rivers, especially Ganga. Save the Spirit of the Sea works towards the conservation of aquatic life through awareness, volunteerism and is currently working on a global movement to preserve river Ganga. As a part of the project, Handa with his team travelled across the river basin for direct action. They raised Rs 20 lakh through crowd funding for the documentary and other community related work along the banks of Ganga. "We undertook our first journey in 2019 to Bihar. Then after the initial lockdown in 2020, we went to Haridwar, Rishikesh and Devprayag," Handa told IANS. In January 2020, the team had documented cleaning along the Yamuna with school children from across Delhi-NCR. Handa, who is currently pursuing a degree in finance with a minor in marine biology from the University of South Florida in the US, said that his earliest protests started when he was in school. For the cause of the environment, he and his friends raised slogans outside the Japanese Embassy in Delhi against dolphin slaughter and also raised the issue on social media. --IANS niv/arm ( 330 Words) 2021-12-17-23:24:39 (IANS)
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