Friday, January 02, 2009

Completion of phase 1 of 'elect a new national animal campaign'

After a week of hectic campaigning & collecting votes, SPROUTS completed phase 1 of 'elect a new national animal campaign'. The last day of phase 1 was on Sunday, 28th December. Our team of volunteers was at SGNP from 6-9am, speaking to people about the campaign & gathering their votes. While some people got the message behind the campaign & chose to cast null votes, some voted for the fielded candidates viz the monkey, elephant or buffalo.

Throughout the week the campaign was held in different parts of Mumbai (CST, Churchgate, Bandra, Andheri, Borivali, Dahisar, Santa Cruz, Vashi) & our volunteers included students from various colleges (Nationals, Sathye, Bhavans, Ruia) along with SPROUTS members, who did the campaigning & collecting of votes. Lot of votes were gathered through our website (www.sproutsenvttrust.org) & through smses.

The conclusion of phase 1 was done at a press conference at Mahim Nature Park on Sunday evening. Here, we began with a brief intro by Anand of how & why SPROUTS was born & the activities that we do. This was followed by details of the campaign by Mr.Parag Shahane, the creative head of Mudra Communications who were the concept behind the campaign, jointly run by Mudra & SPROUTS. We then showed clippings of the campaign & summed it up by chilling facts about the poor tiger stats in India.

At the end, Anand was interviewed by the media channels, whose reporters had quite a few questions about the campaign. Some news channels like IBN-Lokmat, Star-mazaa & Zee 24hrs have been airing the same since yesterday. Do catch the action on TV & we expect more support from you all, as the campaign resumes again to enter into its 2nd phase.



Dr.Sangeeta Dhanuka,
SPROUTS