As the second death anniversary of former President and ‘Missile Man’ of India Dr APJ Abdul Kalam falls on July 27, his connections with Baleswar district came in a flashback.
Not only did he encourage plantation during his tenure at the ITR in Chandipur, he also had established a bird sanctuary in the ITR campus, known as Nisarg.
“The environment gives us a lot; hence it is our prime duty to protect it. Each tree while absorbs about 20 kg of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in a year, it disseminates about 14 kg of oxygen. The trees are of immense value,” Kalam, the Bharat Ratna laureate, had said
while addressing the students on the occasion Golden Jubilee celebration of the Sachindra Kumar High School, langaleswar, Basta on January 5, 2012 .
His every word for the children was encouraging. He batted for quality education, not huge building, facility and propaganda.
“I did my primary education from a school in Rameswarm, Tamil Nadu between 1936 and 1944. The school had an unimpressive building, scanty facilities. Yet there were close contacts among the teachers, students and parents. Each individual student was monitored,” Kalam had said during his last visit to Baleswar.
“We were 55 students in class VIII. For any bad or good reasons, the teachers in the same day used to visit home and apprise our parents. There was no dropout and result was hundred per cent for our batch,” he had said.
Emphasising that education shouldn’t be commercialised, he stressed on a holistic approach, which should be adopted for the development of the students.
To encourage the students and young masses, he used to say, “I am born with potential, goodness, ideas and dreams. I am not for crawling, I have wings to fly. I will fly.”
During National conference on range technology programme on November 29, 2006 at ITR Chandipur, he had said, “I rushed to the banyan tree immediately after landing from the chopper to see the tree. I found the tree is well groomed. Not only did that give me immense pleasure, I could understand the ITR too is going well.”
“The tree was to be cut down during the time of expansion of ITR in early eighties, I had objected to the idea and move was stalled,” Dr Kalam had said.
The father of Indian guided missile programme had urged all the members of the ITR to plant each five trees in the means of celebrating the then success of the coordinated missile interception exercise.
When he was asked by then Defence Minister KC Panth and VS Arunachalam (eminent defence scientist) in the night prior to the Agni missile launch on May 22, 1989 as to how he would like to celebrate the success, Dr Kalam also had expressed his desire to plant 100,000, trees.
