Marginalised Children In Asansol Prove Themselves Through Robotics
This has come about with the help of a social worker, Chandrashekhar Kundu, who was in turn helped by a doctor couple
Published : November 5, 2025 at 7:02 PM IST
Asansol: Children from marginalised families, including school dropouts of Asansol in West Burdwan, are proving themselves in the field of science and robotics. This change has come with the help of a social worker, Chandrashekhar Kundu.
These are the children of masons, daily wage labourers and domestic helps. These are the communities for whom education is a luxury and where children take to labour at an early age by quitting studies.
It is through the efforts of Kundu, who is referred to as the 'Food man' that many of these teenagers are back to school and into the mainstream. He enrolled many teenagers in the school and started coaching them for free, besides establishing a campus where delicious food, music, dance training, football and karate training are available.
Driven by the thought that these children would lag behind if they did not study with the help of smart classes or models like those followed by the private schools, he introduced smart classes on the campus. He wanted the students to learn robotics, but money was a challenge. A doctor couple, Chandrani Pal and Rahul Sarkar, stepped in to address this concern and a Robolution Club was eventually started in the campus set up by Kundu.
A budding engineer from the Asansol Engineering College was enrolled to train the students in robotics, who are now able to make different types of models. They have made a ‘blind-stick' for the visually impaired that can notify them about obstacles. They have also developed a detector to be installed in a car that notifies about hindrances in the path.
These students have come up with models of an automatic wheelchair, devices to measure temperature, gas content and humidity inside a house, an oximeter and a device to measure the heartbeat and many more things.
Kundu said, "The backward and underprivileged families are always looking for instant results from getting educated. When these models are made by the students and taken home, their parents are surprised and forced to think that their children are learning science. This even encourages their neighbours to send their children to school and pursue education."
Debnarayan Singh, the budding engineer, who has been taking robotics classes for these children, said, "These classes are held on the campus twice or thrice a week. The students never miss these classes and are very enthusiastic. I help them, but all the models here are made by the students themselves. They are always thinking of new models. It is very nice to see students who used to leave their studies midway and go to work in a brick kiln making robotics models."
Two of the students, Shreya Paik and Sangita Das, disclosed, "We have been coming to these robotics classes for quite some time. We are now able to make models ourselves. We want to study robotics in the future and want to make artificial intelligence (AI)-developed models."
Kundu disclosed that children also lose interest in studies if they are only taught the syllabus without making learning interesting and fun.
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