Karwar: The Department of Rural Development and Panchayat Raj has launched free summer camps for children in all 229 Gram Panchayats of Uttara Kannada district. These camps are being held at Gram Panchayat Arivu Kendras (Awareness Centres) during the school summer holidays, aiming to provide rural children with an engaging and educational way to spend their vacation.
The 15-day-long summer camps, led by the Gram Panchayats, focus on enhancing reading, writing, creative arts, and play-based learning. The initiative seeks to make the summer holidays both enjoyable and productive for children in rural areas while contributing to their holistic development.
The camps are designed to strengthen academic skills in subjects like mathematics and science, alongside building leadership and communication abilities. Emphasis is also placed on instilling environmental and social awareness, and helping children appreciate local culture, traditions, and history.
Activities include reading storybooks, newspapers, and magazines, storytelling, card reading, essay writing, drawing, speech practice, and other exercises to improve self-expression. Special sessions aim to enhance mathematical and scientific thinking through colorful activities like rainbow creation, geometric shape models, local measurement tools, tangrams, and paper crafts such as fans, jet planes, and blinking dolls. Recreational games such as chess, carrom, and stargazing are also included.
The program also addresses character development, focusing on leadership, morality, empathy, responsibility, teamwork, social adaptability, and civic awareness. To encourage participation and stimulate curiosity, children are involved in project-based activities such as exploring local birds, studying water sources, learning about their villages, festivals, folk songs and stories, traditional sports, and local art forms.
Teams of ten children each are visiting institutions like post offices, dairy cooperatives, banks, veterinary hospitals, anganwadis, gram panchayat offices, and primary health centres as part of these projects. These visits help children understand real-world applications and improve their reporting and observational skills.
Each camp is open to 40 children aged 8 to 13 years from the respective Panchayat area and is being held at the local government school or the Arivu Kendra. The daily schedule has been set for three hours, considering the local summer temperatures.
Speaking about the initiative, Eshwar Kandoo, Chief Executive Officer of the Zilla Panchayat, said, "These summer camps aim to utilize the vacation period effectively and support the intellectual growth of rural children. By introducing social and cultural activities, we hope to foster comprehensive personality development and nurture socially responsible future citizens."