A Punjab based youth leader Gauravdeep Singh, who drew public attention by becoming the face of District administration’s voter awareness drives with his “I vote I lead campaign” in early 2017 has now become an inspiration for all the youngsters of the country. He has been honored as one of the recipients of the prestigious National Youth Award 2018 by Government of India, Ministry of sports and youth affairs. The award was conferred to him by Rajyavardhan Rathore, Union Minister of Sports and Youth affairs and Yogi Aditya Nath, CM Uttar Pradesh on 12th January 2018 in a glittering ceremony at Gautam Budha University Greater Noida. He was honored with a cash prize of Rs 50,000, a medal and a letter of appreciation for excelling in the field social activities.

21 year old Gauravdeep Singh is a final year student of BA- Psychology (Honors) at SCD Government College. A former student and School Captain of BCM Arya model school Shastri Nagar and an IAS aspirant had earlier been involved in social work for almost 8 years. Gauravdeep has participated in various awareness programmes like save water, tree plantation, traffic awareness. He has been associated with 15 different NGOs and has worked with the Municipal Corporation for city beautification projects as well.

The Biggest change in his life came when in the year 2015, he formed “Initiators of Change”, An NGO to make youth socially and politically aware. He says the idea of the organization came when he realized that youngsters were mostly being used by NGOs and politicians just for gathering crowds and as a show of strength, but no one gave value to the ideas of youth. So, he set up the organization for genuine growth, leadership development and active participation of the youth in society in a meaningful way.

The youngster led the “I Vote, I Lead” campaign during the Punjab Assembly elections held in 2017 in order to motivate youths in colleges and educational institutes to vote. As part of the campaign that was lead by Gaurav's organization Initiators Of Change, its members reached out to more than 35,000 youths visiting 18 colleges and 15 villages to motivate youngsters for smart voting. This resulted in creating a concrete impact as the urban youth voter percentage went on to reach the record numbers of 94% in Ludhiana.

Earlier in his journey Gauravdeep Singh has been honored at various state and district levels. He has been one of the award winners of Harvard Model UN conference organized by Harvard University among 1300 students from 9 nations. He was honored with a golden arrow medal by Army General Meston of Golden Arrow Division for his works for society and youth.

He has also been awarded as the Youth Icon for electoral practices by election commission of India for Ludhiana district on National Voter's day 2017.

Talking about his journey of success he said, "The credit goes to my parents, sister Harshleen who sacrificed so much to support me during the campaign. Besides, I owe it to the youngsters of Initiators of change who came up with me as social contributors." He thanked all the youngsters of Punjab for helping him reach there and for supporting the projects of Initiators of Change.

He believes that only a leader has the capability to transform a dream into reality and hence works for creating more and more leaders for their city and providing them a platform to excel in their own fields of interest.

0 Comments