BANGLORE: While the recession has sent economists and politicians scrambling in the search for an exit door, a group of people have thrashed out a strategy to beat the turmoil. Their tool: social networking sites.

The Freecycle Group, formed in the city in 2006, is the latest example of how social networking can be tailored to tackle the meltdown. The group is a non-profit organisation whose members exchange materials among themselves free of cost and on condition of bartering.

Freecyclers now see the fraternity as an opportunity to beat the recession.

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Divyanshi Pandey does not believe in ghosts. But whenever the 13-year-old visits her neighbourhood cyber cafe, she can feel the soul of her old c
omputers linger. The sleek black machines there may look nothing like her heavy, discoloured, convex desktops-but deep inside two of them rest the organs of her benevolent, dead computers.

Six months ago, the Lucknow-based schoolgirl obliged the cybercafe owner with the two PCs. It wasn’t a bout of charity or selflessness-in Divyanshi’s peer group, the generosity is called ‘freecycling’. The term, very often confused with ‘recycling’ in India, refers to one of the biggest global environmental initiatives to “change the world, one gift at a time”.

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