Efforts of Elderly people bring gym back to life

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This news concerns 12 elderly people who collected money to repair an open-air gym at Gandhi Park Dehradun.

This article and photo have been taken from a newspaper’s website Dainik Jagaran in Hindi.

Elderly people used their own money and efforts to repair the open-air gym at Gandhi Park in Dehradun – Dainik Jagran

The open-air gym was inaugurated in 2019 by the then Chief Minister Trivendra Singh Rawat and developed by Nagar Nigam. The gym was opened for the public’s convenience in a city lacking parks, but in the last few months, due to lack of care and protection, more than half of the machines had been left unusable. Issues included, the pedal of the cycling machine going missing or broken, and the shoulder machine parts had gone missing or had been broken. Nut bolts and other parts of some machines were broken, in some cases, alternative measures were used, but they were not strong enough to work for a long time.

This park in general sees a lot of people of varying ages visit and use the facility, and especially since the cost of professional gyms is quite high, the new open-air gym facility was popular among the elderly people. These elderly people had complained to the local Municipality officers several times about it and requested to restore the gym to its working conditions, but they have been ignoring their request for a long time now.

The people then got sick of not being heard by the administration and decided to stand up for the public themselves, taking the matter into their own hands to get the gym repaired. These people made self-contributions and got ten thousand rupees collected and using local help, got the machines repaired. Now all the broken or missing parts of the machines have been repaired and the gym is back up and running. There are other facilities in this park as well like a play yard for children for which there is a fee to enter, and now these patrons have requested the Municipality to put a boundary to the gym area and ask for a nominal fee for its use. With a fee in place, they’ll be able to afford a guard there and ensure that the gym remains usable for much longer.

There is a very low scale of people who think of the public. These good-hearted people understood their responsibility to society and brought back life to the gym. We definitely need more participation from the people in society, and we have great examples like the people who made this effort.

Thanks for reading!