Painting The City Beautiful

Painting The City Beautiful

Driven by the goal to be one of the smartest cities in the country, Bhubaneswar is witnessing a serious makeover with beautification drives. The city dons the look of an open art gallery with murals and wall paintings giving it a more vibrant and lively appearance while highlighting Odisha’s rich culture and heritage through them.

Taking forward their artistic endeavour to beautify Bhubaneswar, which started in 2016, Bakul Foundation in association with Bhubaneswar Smart City Limited, Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation and United Nations Population Funds (UNFPA) started making wall paintings in areas of Shanti Nagar Slum near Mali Sahi.

With themes like child marriage, gender equality, cleanliness, green environment, women empowerment, the murals on the walls are a small step to create awareness among the people residing in the nearby localities.

Interacting with My City Links, Sujit Mohapatra, founder of Bakul Foundation said, “The murals at Shanti Nagar are the new addition to our initiative of beautifying the city under the Smart City Project. This time, we have chosen themes like cleanliness, gender equality and women empowerment among others to sensitise people residing in the slum areas on these issues.”

Describing the murals, Sujit added, “Apart from being beautiful, the paintings educate as well. There is one interesting mural with a male figure and a female figure. Instead of having the human heads, they have flowers growing and watering each other. It conveys a message of gender equality and that if we support each other, our society will thrive.”

Needless to mention, a lot of hard work has gone into this endeavour. It took a week for a team of 50 artists to complete the task. Talking to MCL, artist Pinaki R Mohanty, under whose guidance the paintings were made, said, “I have been associated with Bakul Foundation for the last couple of years and have participated in the beautification project at various places in the city. This time we decided to highlight some interesting social issues.”

The area where most of the paintings have been made was earlier used for open defecation. “Slum children and members of Humara Bachpan cleaned up the 5000 square feet area, which is now being used as a playground,” told Pinaki.

It was in 2016 when Bakul Foundation came up with the idea of beautification of Bhubaneswar Railway Station through art and the initiative received appreciation from all quarters. Later, Bakul joined hands with BMC and became a major partner for the city beautification project, which they carried out at Rajmahal Square, Acharya Vihar and Vani Vihar besides other locations. 

Recently, murals were painted on the walls of Telgu Basti in the city under this initiative. Most of the murals convey the message – ‘Education is a right, not a privilege’, to inform children about the need of education and to also promote a child friendly city.

Meanwhile, BSCL authorities are planning to include more areas in the city under the street wall painting initiative.