Panvel volunteers pack Diwali snacks for 18,000 soldiers on the borders

Panvel: Residents of Panvel are sending Diwali faral (festive snacks) to soldiers guarding the borders, far from their families during the festival. The Bharat Vikas Parishad's Panvel branch is preparing boxes for 18,000 soldiers this year, the seventh year of the initiative, with volunteers and residents busy filling them.

Each box holds 125 grams of chivda, shankarpali, four chaklis and four dry-fruit laddoos. Twenty boxes go into a larger master box to keep them safe in transit. Because the faral is meant for soldiers in high-altitude, harsh-weather posts such as Tawang in Arunachal Pradesh, Leh, Ladakh and Siachen, it is being packed to last.

Handwritten greeting cards will go with the snacks. Schoolchildren, women and other residents have written them in Marathi and Hindi, some with poems.

The initiative is a way of showing goodwill to the soldiers defending the border, said Dr Kirti Samudra, a regional officer of the Bharat Vikas Parishad's women's wing for Konkan, Mumbai and Goa. The soldiers send back photographs, videos and letters when the faral arrives, she said, and that encourages the volunteers to do more the following year.

Source: Navarashtra