Dehra Dun and the hill station of Mussoorie were once abundant in lush green forests and gushing springs. However with so-called economic growth, lime stone mining and felling of trees became common. Limestone quarrying was a lucrative business and as usual in their greed they overdid it …destroying the natural limestone aquifers, causing soil erosion and environmental degradation
There was a court case by the people against the lime stone contractors, which led to closure of many of the mines but the damage had been done…
Every year Welhamites would go for tree plantation …I cant remember the figures of how many trees we planted… but I do remember it was loads…we would start off from school early in the morning with packed lunches and be back quite late…And in a place like Dehra Dun where it rains for 10 months in a year…we invariably got caught in showers…however that did not dampen our spirits …moreover if we reached a certain limit we would get 5 star chocolates (u can see Superna and Radhika waving their chocolates in the snap)…
In 1989 there were severe floods in India…causing loss of life and property…I remember the appeal by our principle Mrs Shanthi Varma. We needed to do something to help them …a decision that we would forego the curd from our lunch and pudding from dinner :-( for a week. The amount saved would be sent for relief operations…
But this did not seem enough…so we planned a sponsored walk… all the girls would get sponsorship @ 100 Rs/km and walk 12 kms from school through the city centre till Rajpur Road…
Since it was a hostel and we came from different parts of the world…it was not so simple…wherein we could just get our parents to sponsor us… we had to get in touch with the industrialists in Dehra Dun…I got my sponsorship from Toyota Cars…
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