The Indian Premier League (IPL) is finally in India after the General Elections have concluded in most parts of the country. The team based in the financial capital of India, the Mumbai Indians is owned by Reliance Foundation Chairman Nita Ambani. The Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) owned Reliance Foundation has been one of the main supporters of EFA i.e., Education for All. As such, Nita Ambani along with a few key Mumbai Indians personnel such as Sachin Tendulkar has also campaigned for EFA.
On Saturday, Mumbai Indian’s first’s match in India in 2014, around 19,000 children were present in the iconic Wankhede Stadium. All the seats of the stadium were reserved for the school children. The Brihanmumbai Electric supply and Transport (BEST) supplied 425 buses to ferry the school going children, aged between 6 and 15 to and from the Wankhede.
Along with Reliance Foundation, six other NGO’s were too involved in this extraordinary event. Nita Ambani, Founder and Chairperson, Reliance Foundation, said, “We started EFA in 2010 and since then, every year we arranged for around 500 seats for underprivileged children. However, last year, while interacting with a few of them, I realized that most children wanted their siblings to watch the matches as well. As we started to count, the number kept going up, and this year we have over 18, 000 children having a time of their life.”
The happiness on the faces of the children inside the stadium was evident and social media was abuzz at the stadium being full of school children. Shaban Ubaidul Rehman Khan, a class 6 student of Petit Municipal School in Bandra thoroughly enjoyed the atmosphere of the IPL match against Kings XI Punjab. “This is the first time I have come to the stadium. I am extremely happy that my sister, brother and my best friend are also with me,” she said.
One of the NGO’s supporting Reliance Foundation is Pratham which works for the education of underprivileged children. “We have around 500 students from our NGO here at the Sunil Gavaskar stand. We have brought children from across Mumbai,” said Fazal Shaikh one of the volunteers at Pratham. Wearing white t-shirts, Shaikh along with at least 20 other volunteers kept moving across the stand to monitor the children.