Srujanika, a volunteer group started by a scientist couple, once led a movement to make science popular among children in Odisha, India. The group must now archive 200 years of decaying printed literature in the Odia language.
In the early 1980s, a small group of science enthusiast volunteers called Srujanika emerged in the Indian state of Odisha, which would soon become a movement. Founded in Bhubaneswar, the capital of Odisha, by scientist couple Puspashree Pattnaik and Nikhil Mohan Pattnaik, this small group would travel across the state and beyond to make science popular among children. Their effort took science outside the textbooks and groomed a new generation of scholars and learners. Through their work, they extensively studied the printed Odia publications and realised
early how fast the old printed works were vanishing. That realisation led to the digital archival initiative in the Odia language—10,000 volumes printed in 200 years were collected, scanned and archived. It resulted in two major online repositories: the Open Access to Odia Books (OaOb) project, hosted at the National Institute of Technology Rourkela, and the Odia Bibhaba, managed by Srujanika. This work includes digitising the monumental 1930-1940 lexicon Purnnachandra Odia Bhashakosha and over 20 dictionaries. This film captures how only a handful of volunteers at Srujanika spearheaded two major movements and created a culture of making science more fun and exploratory through horizontal and peer learning for children.