Vol. 10, Special Issue 5 (2021)

Author(s):
Chaitanya Kumari MS, Siresha M and Dayal Prasad Babu J

Abstract:
Student youth network of volunteers are organized at all colleges under the umbrella of National Service Scheme aimed at developing student's personality through community service. In this digital era, plethora of information on any issue leaves the public in confusion. The right information should flow in a right path with right people to clear the public quandary. The NSS volunteers of College of Community Science have utilized their classroom knowledge, practical skills, time and talents for a good cause of awareness creation during COVID-19 pandemic. They have developed and shared media material to create awareness on Corona virus. The study was conducted to know the sense of social responsibility and contribution of the Community Science NSS volunteers. Exploratory research design was applied and data was collected through a structured schedule from 211 volunteers. Results revealed that 96.21% students have smart phones and 90% of volunteers believed that social networking platforms influence the individual behavior and used the same for sharing COVID health guidelines. WhatsApp (79.6%) Instagram (12.3%) were the preferred apps and students used to visit applications 5-10 times (50.71%) followed by 2-5 times (26.54%) in a day. Fifty percent of the volunteers shared videos followed by posters (33.03%) and text (14.7%) on COVID-19. Volunteers educated their family members and relatives very frequently (39.81%) to frequently (33.65%). Nearly 70% of the students assisted the local volunteers and 95.23% of them installed the Arogya setu app and 81.04% have registered on the Integrated Government Online Training (iGOT) portal for COVID related training. The volunteers distributed stitched face masks (56.87%) and supported underprivileged group (65.40%). About 86.3% students contributed through various means like media material development like animation (1.90%) video (5.21%) posters (59.72%) audio (19.4%) on health, nutrition and COVID-SoPs which were circulated widely for connecting their community with science to mitigate the pandemic.