Pune: Dravid High School in Maharashtra’s Wai town showed artistic skills by transforming a dead ‘silver oak’ tree stump into the shape of a pencil rather than uprooting it.
Though educational institutions in Satara’s Wai town are shut in view of the rising COVID-19 cases, people in the vicinity are now visiting the school just to witness the new piece of art located at the entrance of the school.
Run by the Deccan Education Society, the secondary school in Wai engaged a carpenter to transform the stump of the tree into a six-foot-tall ‘pencil’. Pencil is the logo of the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, the Central government’s flagship programme for universal elementary education.
“We had an old silver oak tree which was dead for last several years and since it was at the entrance of the school, it was posing a danger to the school building as it could have fallen any time,” Dravid High School principal Nagesh Mone was quoted as saying by news agency PTI.
Initially, the principal had called some woodcutters to uproot the dead tree. “However, since the entire exercise was expensive, we decided to do something innovative,” Mone said. He then showed the tree to a carpenter, who was doing some work at the school, and asked if it could be given the shape of a pencil since its stump was straight.
“The carpenter took five to six days to give the shape of a pencil to the dead silver oak tree stump,” Mone told the agency.
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