Oberoi International School

1. RALF: Roads
Are Litter-Free
Kartik Mehra, Saipriya Patro,
and Malaika Fernandes

2. FEEL
 List the situations/problems in your
school/community that bothered you.
 We, as students of Oberoi International School,
Goregaon, were bothered by:
 The amount of trash on Mumbai’s roads, especially the
roads around our school.
 The way everybody criticized BMC and continued to
litter instead of taking action.

3. FEEL
 Who was affected by the situation and what did they
say?
 The following people were affected by the unclean area
around our school:
 The people who live near our school.
 The students and teachers who use the roads to come to
school (walking or using a vehicle).
 All other pedestrians.
 Almost everybody believed it was not their own fault; they
blamed the dirty roads on BMC and the lack of dustbins.

4. FEEL

5. IMAGINE
 State the problem you chose and why you CHOSE
it.
 We chose to solve the problem of unclean roads
surrounding OUR school because:
 These are OUR roads, OUR school, and OUR city. We want
to be proud of it! We want it to look good!
 Unclean roads are unhygienic and unsanitary.
 Littering contributes to hurting our planet, which in turn
hurts us.

6. IMAGINE
 List the different solutions you came up with. Which
one did you choose to implement and why?
 The solutions we came up with were:
 Organizing an event for students in our school to clean up
the roads.
 Standing on the sidewalk and talking to the people who
pass by and throw litter on the roads.
 Putting up dustbins on the roads - We chose this because
this is more permanent and more people would be able
to contribute by putting litter in the bins.

7. IMAGINE

8. DO
 This is our story of CHANGE!
The three of us were a part of Leadership Café, a course designed to help us
develop better habits and mindsets. Our mentors asked us to think about one thing
in our society that we strongly feel we should change, and the three of us decided
to stop the littering on the roads around our school. We wanted a long-term solution
for the littler on the roads near our school so we decided to put Dustbins outside our
school.
In order to accomplish this task, we contacted the BMC official Mr Lalit Talekar, and
arranged a meeting with him and proposed to put 4 dustbins on the 3 roads
surrounding the school. Mr. Lalit was very eager to help. He told us we would need a
letter from the school agreeing to provide security for the dustbins so that they could
not be stolen.

9. DO
With the help of the deputy head of middle school, Ms. Priya Ramteke, we
wrote a very detailed formal proposal and arranged a meeting with our
principal, Mr. Vladimir Kuskovski. He was happy to help and he directed us to
Mr. Jaywant Pol, the security head of our school. We also spoke to Mr.
Shailesh, the security head of a nearby building. Mr. Jaywant and Mr. Shailesh
worked together to write the letter, and within a month, we had 4 pole-mounted
steel dustbins around our school.

10. DO

11. SHARE
 What were the different ways in which you shared
your story of change with the world?
 When we put up the dustbins, we made a
presentation about our story of how we changed our
society in our own little way.
 We shared this presentation among our mentors,
family, friends and classmates in Leadership Café. We
contacted everyone who helped us and told them
about our accomplishment.
 Ms. Priya, the deputy head of middle school, started a
competition for 6th and 7th graders. The competition is
where students try to change their society for the
better. Ms. Priya made our team the role model for the
students.