Dehradun’s own student activist group, Making a Difference by Being the Difference (MAD) volunteered to creatively assist Uttarakhand Police at its third edition of the Dehradun Marathon, today morning.
The Dehradun Marathon 2018, drew close to 20,000 participants who took part in the Uttarakhand police awareness run against Drug Abuse. MAD, comprising of educated, conscious youngsters of the city, the police reached out to the team and requested support. In several meetings that were convened by ADG Law and Order Ashok Kumar, MAD members stressed on using steel glasses or eco friendly paper cups against plastic bottles handed out to participants at the marathon.
Leading by example, MAD members showcased their own MADATHON- MAD’s own mini- marathon, which had been running on completely eco-friendly lines for the past seven years. In the 2018 edition, MADATHON became the first mini-marathon of the city to be a complete zero waste event as they used steel glasses procured from various Gurudwaras and Garhwal Sabha at different water filling points for their 8000 runners.
ADG Law and Order, Ashok Kumar was very impressed with the eco-friendly input and substantially implement the same for the Dehradun Marathon as well. MAD assisted the effort with over 35 volunteers at water filling stations in an attempt to minimise use of plastic.
MAD made a fervent pitch that all promotional material should be non-plastic and for this they made a cloth banner of dimensions 20 ft. by 5 ft. themselves.
The police put on record its appreciation for MAD’s creative engagement which was put together by MAD’s President Karan Kapoor, Shreya Singh Rohilla, Archie, Gayatri, Inder, Sanat, Hridayesh, Utkarsh among others.