Feb 13, 2019 / NGO

Techno India and Y-East #WarmTheStreets of Kolkata

Kolkata, January 10th, 2019 – ‘295,000, that’s the number that you need to keep in mind. It is the Guinness World Record for the biggest clothes collective drive

held by Dubai. And we want Kolkata to break it’, explained Meghdut Roy Chowdhury, Director at Techno India Group.

That’s the ambition with which the #WarmTheStreets campaign started. On December 5th, 2018, Techno India Group indeed launched a one-month long clothes collection drive, in association with its social and environmental arm Y-East and more than 25 other drop-off points and distribution points partners. ‘We welcome any organization – corporations, cafes, hospitals, NGOs, schools, stores… – across the city to join hands as a drop-off point and as an advocate of the campaign around them. And we invite each and every citizen as a donor. We need to realize that most of us accumulate tons of clothes that we barely wear and remain unused in our closet. It is high time we take them out for the ones who need it a lot more’, added back then Pauline Laravoire, Sustainability Director at Techno India and Y-East Founder.

Local word of mouth and social media were the communication enablers of the #WarmTheStreets campaign. For instance, internationally acclaimed tabla player Tanmoy Bose and his band took a pledge to give some clothes, so did media influencer KheyaChattopadhyay on Facebook.

Techno India and its partners organized two distribution drives. The first one took place on Tuesday 18th December, following a carefully designed itinerary to the most relevant places across the city, established in partnership with NGOs who already work on the field such as Responsible Charity, Clothes For Help and Terra Indica. The final distribution drive happened on January 12th, one week after the end of the collection, at Seva Kendra Calcutta’s main centre in Tengra.

Outcome of the campaign: more than 3,000 individuals from underprivileged areas located in Topsia, Howrah and Tengra, all of this possible through city-level collaboration and collective action.