Pooja Rai, the founder of Anthill Creations, also a graduate of the ‘IIT Kharagpur’ is the reason for happiness for many underprivileged kids in India. Rai, with her four other batch mates, created a not-for-profit organization in Bengaluru, which works tirelessly on new and innovative ideas to help society. Pooja has graduated in Architecture from IIT Kharagpur in 2015 and thereafter, she applied her architecture learnings to build sustainable playgrounds for children. She strongly believes that playing is an integral part of a child’s development. In a country where urban spaces are crowded enough to have playgrounds, it becomes a challenge to involve the children in playful activities in the open air. Similarly, in slum areas, the children hardly get access to playgrounds are oblivious of the fun they can do in a playground.
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Working on this need of the society, Pooja Rai and various alumni of her college created the Anthill creations. Pooja tells the media that she got the idea of building the sustainable playgrounds when she was returning from college one day. On her way, she saw many children playing around with broken concrete pipes. The architecture student then started working on the project and started the upcycling of scrap to build interesting elements in the playgrounds.
Anthill Creations: Innovative Ideas of Pooja Rai and IIT Alumnus
Her innovative project involves the use of scrap and waste material such as tin cans, rubber tubes, and tries to make play slides, seesaws, and many other things that the kids enjoy playing on in the playgrounds. The cans, plastic sheets, and other scraps are painted in different colors and used in the playground. The company has built more than 250 playgrounds in the country, and have also stated more initiatives to help the underprivileged children of the society. The playground was built at a low cost as they mostly used waste scrap material.
As she with her batchmates, embarked on the journey of building playgrounds, she got support from tire companies like Michelin and Apollo Tires. They donated many tires to Anthill, which were put to use by the company. Anthill Creations also tied up with Himachal Pradesh based social enterprise named ‘Recity’ which works to manage urban waste.
All work and no play ?- Sustainable Playgrounds come to the rescue
Almost 70 tires are used in a playground, as they are used to make for climbing, swinging, and even in see-saws. Pooja Rai boasts of her company developing context-specific playgrounds, with waste materials found in local areas, and even old carts, in the state of Odisha. The company makes playgrounds that are unstructured, as that gives the child liberty to innovate use them to devise games. The company also ensures that the playgrounds are child-friendly by collaborating with the concerned city or government.
The playgrounds can be ready in 5 days’ time, and the company ensures vising the playgrounds every 6 months to check on the maintenance process. India’s landfill sites are dumped with 31 million tons of scrap every year, and Anthill Creations has used some of that material to build their playgrounds.
Pooja Rai also shared that after she built the playground in Bengaluru for a government school, the student absenteeism came down significantly, as the kids loved to come to school before time and enjoy the area. She also perceives for everyone, whether rich or poor, to have easy access to playgrounds, and thus works to build more projects in the country.
Pooja Rai also started a “Play in a Box initiative’ for children in the lockdown, where the company supplied play-and-learn games for poor children, who were missing out on studies and playing.
