Forty students of Meghalaya and five staff from North-Eastern Hill University (NEHU) are exploring the rich culture and heritage of Uttar Pradesh as part of a Yuva Sangam intercultural exchange tour.
The tour is an initiative of the Ek Bharat Shreshtha Bharat Mission, started by the Union Ministry of Education.
After their arrival at Lucknow railway station, the delegation was received emphatically by the Yuva Sangam team of Uttar Pradesh represented by the Babasaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar University, Lucknow.
NEHU had only recently hosted a visit by the Lucknow university students and now it was the turn of the latter to impress the visitors from Meghalaya.
First, they dropped in at Raj Bhavan and had an interaction with the Principal Secretary to the Governor, Kalpana Awasthi, who explained the workings of the Governor’s secretariat.
The students also shared about the culture and heritage of Meghalaya with the staff of Raj Bhavan.
After the interaction, the youth were given a tour of the Raj Bhavan compound, which included the agricultural area, bird sanctuary and different halls of the Raj Bhavan building, which is a heritage site being the residence of the erstwhile Nawabs of Lucknow during the Mughal and British Indian era.
The youth were then taken to the famous Bara Imambara, a congregation hall, of Lucknow.
One of the students, being awed by the beauty of the structure, asked the teacher in charge of the tour, “How did the people during those times build structures like these with technology and machines, yet back home our dome designed by architects and engineers does not survive even for six months?”, perhaps referring to the doomed dome of the new Assembly building, which collapsed suddenly while under construction in May last year.
In the evening session, the youth of Meghalaya were introduced to the students of BBAU Lucknow in the buddy session, where they exchanged numbers to get acquainted and help in learning about life at the university as well as in Uttar Pradesh.
The second day saw the students visit the CSIR – Central Institute of Medicinal and Aromatic Plants and Kukrail Reserve Forest for an educational tour.
The students learnt about various medicinal plants and their uses, which are also found in the North East. The students also visited the captive breeding and conservation centre for freshwater gharials and the turtles in the Kukrail Reserve Forest which are endangered animals.
The students were enthralled by the scientific and environmental research being done in the CSIR lab and the captive breeding centre of the Kukrail Reserve Forest.
