Hubballi: A young school teacher in the backward Hyderabad-Karnataka region has silently been encouraging children to write for the past 10 years by bringing out an in-house magazine. The non-profit magazine is circulated among children and teachers of several schools across the state.‘Mandara Kannada’, a Kannada quarterly, is a 16-page magazine published from Malkapur, a small village in Maski taluk of Raichur district. The magazine is the brainchild of Ravichandra D aka Raviraj Sagar, a 32-year-old teacher and writer who has been working at the Higher Primary School at Malkapur.After 10 years, his efforts have been recognised by private organisations including India Foundation for the Arts (IFA), a not-for-profit grant-making organisation that has been supporting research, practice and education in the arts and culture across India since 1995, and Citibank.Ravichandra told TOI that after he was appointed as a teacher in June 2008, he thought of bringing out a tabloid for encouraging the writer in each child. “Since I studied journalism in college, I wanted to start a quarterly tabloid. I started working on it after I got my first salary. Initially, I conducted workshops on poetry and writing to my schoolchildren. Later, I encouraged them to write.”“The first print was only 10 copies. The tabloid was limited to my school for three years and later spread to other schools in the taluk and district. Noted novelist and president of 80th Kannada Sahitya Sammelana Na D’souza gave a phone interview to schoolchildren. Many teachers came forward to help me in printing more copies and distribute it free of cost to children at those schools,” he said.Arif Raja, a recipient of the Kendra Sahitya Academy’s Yuva Puraskara in 2012, said Ravichandra has encouraged students from the backward region to showcase their talent.“The writings of children reveal how the kids view the events happening around them, including migration which has remained an unsolved problem in the region. The teacher’s job is commendable,” he said.Ravichandra said the tabloid has been converted into a magazine. He prints 100 copies. Gurupadayya Swami, a 7th standard student at the school, said he wrote four poems and essays and it encouraged him to be a writer. Vijayalakshmi, another student, said she writes about rural games which has helped improved her writing.

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