Techfest, the annual technical festival of Indian Institute of Technology, Powai launched its anti-smoking campaign on Monday. The campaign, which is part of Techfest’s social initiative will is part of the run-up to the actual festival to be held in the first week of January 2014 and will span 50 colleges in 12 cities.
Pointing to the initiative, Shrey Singh, manager Techfest ’13 said that the festival was well established as Asia’s largest science and technology festival and is patronised by Unesco and Unicef. “Techfest has diversified into an organisation that apart from showcasing the pinnacle of technical advancement, also strives for the betterment of society with unique initiatives,” said Singh.
He further added that youth is the most attracted crowd towards smoking and the only reason for this is the “glamour” quotient involved. “It’s not only the smoking that kills, passive smoking is also a reason,” said Singh.
This year’s Techfest, has launched its campaign “ISMOKE — Support the movement to kill cancer” in association with ICS (Indian Cancer Society), with a vision to spread the message among the youth to quit smoking.
The ISMOKE campaign was inaugurated by actress Amrita Rao on July 29 at the IIT-Powai campus during the freshmen orientation. The campaign is being supported by actors Darsheel Safary, Ayushmann Khuranna and Sana Saeed.
The campaign will span the whole country covering around 50 colleges in 12 cities — Mumbai, Pune, Surat, Kolkata, Bhubaneswar, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Delhi, Jaipur, Nagpur, Indore, Nashik. To spread the anti-smoking word in different parts of India, a signature campaign will be conducted in which a person will be asked to write something about the campaign with his signature.