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By:

Quaid Najmi

4 January 2025 at 3:26:24 pm

Maulana’s 'gullak' initiative touches 60K students

Read & Lead Foundation President Maulana Abdul Qayyum Mirza with daughter Mariyam Mirza. Mumbai/Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar: In the new age controlled by smart-gadgets and social media, an academic from Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar has sparked a small, head-turning and successful - ‘savings and reading’ revolution among middle-school children. Launched in 2006, by Maulana Abdul Qayyum Mirza, the humble initiative turns 20 this year and witnessed over 60,000 free savings boxes (gullaks)...

Maulana’s 'gullak' initiative touches 60K students

Read & Lead Foundation President Maulana Abdul Qayyum Mirza with daughter Mariyam Mirza. Mumbai/Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar: In the new age controlled by smart-gadgets and social media, an academic from Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar has sparked a small, head-turning and successful - ‘savings and reading’ revolution among middle-school children. Launched in 2006, by Maulana Abdul Qayyum Mirza, the humble initiative turns 20 this year and witnessed over 60,000 free savings boxes (gullaks) distributed to Class V-VIII students in 52 government and private schools. “The aim was to inculcate a love for ‘saving and reading’ among young children. We started by presenting small plastic ‘gullaks’ (savings boxes) at the Iqra Boys & Girls High School, and later to many other schools,” Mirza said with a tinge of satisfaction. Scoffed by sceptics, it soon caught the eyes of the schools and parents who loved the idea that kept the kids off mischief, but gave them the joy of quietly slipping Re. 1 or even Rs. 5 save from their daily pocket money into the ‘gullak’. “That tiny ‘gullak’ costing barely Rs 3-Rs 5, becomes almost like their personal tiny bank which they guard fiercely and nobody dares touch it. At the right time they spend the accumulated savings to buy books of their choice – with no questions asked. Isn’t it better than wasting it on toys or sweets or amusement,” chuckled Mirza. A childhood bookworm himself, Mirza, now 50, remembers how he dipped into his school’s ‘Book Box’ to avail books of his choice and read them along with the regular syllabus. “Reading became my passion, not shared by many then or even now… Sadly, in the current era, reading and saving are dying habits. I am trying to revive them for the good of the people and country,” Maulana Mirza told The Perfect Voice. After graduation, Mirza was jobless for sometime, and decided to make his passion as a profession – he took books in a barter deal from the renowned Nagpur philanthropist, Padma Bhushan Maulana Abdul Karim Parekh, lugged them on a bicycle to hawk outside mosques and dargahs. He not only sold the entire stock worth Rs 3000 quickly, but asked astonished Parekh for more – and that set the ball rolling in a big way, ultimately emboldening him to launch the NGO, ‘Read & Lead Foundation’ (2018). “However, despite severe resources and manpower crunch, we try to cater to the maximum number of students, even outside the district,” smiled Mirza. The RLF is also supported by his daughter Mariyam Mirza’s Covid-19 pandemic scheme, ‘Mohalla Library Movement’ that catapulted to global fame, and yesterday (Oct. 20), the BBC telecast a program featuring her. The father-daughter duo urged children to shun mobiles, video-games, television or social media and make ‘books as their best friends’, which would always help in life, as they aim to gift 1-lakh students with ‘gullaks’ in the next couple of years. At varied intervals Mirza organizes small school book fairs where the excited kids troop in, their pockets bulging with their own savings, and they proudly purchase books of their choice in Marathi, English, Hindi or Urdu to satiate their intellectual hunger. Fortunately, the teachers and parents support the kids’ ‘responsible spending’, for they no longer waste hours before screens but attentively flip pages of their favourite books, as Mirza and others solicit support for the cause from UNICEF, UNESCO, and global NGOs/Foundations. RLF’s real-life savers: Readers UNICEF’s Jharkhand District Coordinator and ex-TISS alumnus Abul Hasan Ali is full of gratitude for the ‘gullak’ habit he inculcated years ago, while Naregaon Municipal High School students Lakhan Devdas (Class 6) and Sania Youssef (Class 8) say they happily saved most of their pocket or festival money to splurge on their favourite books...! Zilla Parishad Girls Primary School (Aurangpura) teacher Jyoti Pawar said the RLF has proved to be a “simple, heartwarming yet effective way” to habituate kids to both reading and savings at a tender age, while a parent Krishna Shinde said it has “changed the whole attitude of children”. “We encourage books of general interest only, including inspiring stories of youth icons like Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai (28) and environmentalist Greta Thunberg (23) which fascinates our students, and other popular children’s literature,” smiled Mirza. The Maulana’s RLF, which has opened three dozen libraries in 7 years, acknowledges that every coin dropped into the small savings boxes begins a new chapter – and turns into an investment in knowledge that keeps growing.

Messed up investigation puzzles ex top cops

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Mumbai: A pall of gloom pervades the state’s police and security circles after yesterday’s Bombay High Court judgement that entirely overturned the trial court’s verdict by acquitting all the 12 convicts in the macabre 7/11, 2006 multiple bomb blasts in Mumbai suburban trains, killing 187 commuters.


Shaking their heads in disbelief, retired IPS officers and other senior police personnel termed the outcome as ‘shocking’, ‘unexpected’, ‘shameful’, etc., and they wonder who would be fall guys for the botched 7/11 probe that tumbled out in the piercing 667-page order delivered by Justice Anil S. Kilor and Justice Shyam C. Chandak. 


Ex-IPS and intelligence officers like Dr. P. S. Pasricha, S. M. Mushrif, Vikram Bokey, Shirish Inamdar and others who spoke with ‘The Perfect Voice’ without mincing words described how the verdict is a veritable slap on the investigation teams and the legal advisors involved in the probe. 


The judgement seemed to have inadvertently opened up the schisms within the state IPS lobbies as some made no bones of the discomfiture faced by their former colleagues, and the political establishment of the time. 


Simultaneously, the legal fraternity is abuzz with many lawyers and experts poring deeply into the verdict, the judicial nuances and its ramifications for the future, as many even grudgingly praised the judges for their ‘unorthodox findings’.


Experts speak exclusively with ‘The Perfect Voice’

Ex-DGP - Dr. P. S. Pasricha: Heading the Maharashtra Police at that time (2006), Dr. Pasricha gently said that he was not directly connected with the 7/11 probe which was handled by the then Mumbai Commissioner of Police A. N. Roy. Declining to comment on the verdict, Dr. Pasricha said that just as the (city) police team had grabbed all the credit for it then, now they should reply to the court outcome, too.

 

Ex-Additional Deputy Commissioner, State Intelligence Department Shirish Inamdar: This is unprecedented that an entire verdict of the Trial (lower) Court in a sensitive terror case has been quashed and set aside. 

“The questions that arise are the quality of evidence and the police’s skills to present it before the courts, the Trial Court’s ability in weighing that evidence. The HC ruling says that MCOCA was applied mechanically and not with an application of the mind. Why and how was it done as there are separate laws like POTA, TADA, UAPA, etc. for terrorism and such terror cases can’t be tried under MCOCA,” said Inamdar.


Ex-IGP Nagpur Range - S. M. Mushrif: All this cannot be erroneous. I feel that the arrests of those (accused) Muslim youths were intentionally done, the Trial Court verdict falls in the same category. 

“There was not an iota of evidence in the (7/11) case with the police, barring the confessions of the accused-convicts, who now stand cleared off all charges. Who was the legal advisor to the police who guided or helped in the 7/11 case investigations?” demanded Mushrif. 


Saying this is not the only case, but there are other cases in which the investigators deliberately or mistakenly botched, Mushrif asked how the government will deal with this to prevent recurrences.

 

Ex-DCP (IX) Vikram Bokey: He cautioned that the governments, at the Centre, Maharashtra and other states, ‘must not take the verdict lightly as it will have ramifications all over the country’, besides eroding public faith. 


“If this is the fate of the biggest railway terrorism in the world which claimed over 187 innocents, questions will be raised on the investigations, not only in this case, but in cases probed by other security/specialized agencies like the ATS, NIA, CBI, ED, NCB, or more,” warned Bokey, with a dozen encounters of notorious criminals to his credit.


Citing examples, Bokey added that doubts will naturally rise in public minds over the credibility of long-winded investigations into some high-profile cases in the recent past, which finally proved to be duds in the courts.


Inamdar urged that the government should appoint a commission of inquiry to probe the entire 7/11 case investigation team, affix the full responsibility and take action for the monumental lapses. 


Bokey and Mushrif aver that though the state has announced it will move the Supreme Court, “who knows how long it will take and what would be its outcome”. 


Hence, the government must initiate simultaneous efforts to find out the ‘real truth’ behind the 7/11 terror strikes without resorting to a witch-hunt targeting a particular group/community, and ensure justice is done to the victims.

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