Santiniketan, Feb. 25: Visva-Bharati has started an initiative to popularise Rabindranath Tagore's songs in the rural areas surrounding Santiniketan by organising workshops involving prominent singers such as Dwijen Mukherjee, Srikanta Acharya and Srabani Sen.

One such workshop was organised yesterday by Visva-Bharati's Institute of Rural Reconstruction in Sriniketan. The workshop was attended by around 80 young girls from several villages. They were given lessons on Rabindra Sangeet by singers Mukherjee, Acharya, Sen and Swapan Basu.

Four such sessions were held as part of the workshop.

Varsity officials said more such workshops would be organised over the next few months, in line with similar programmes held by Tagore himself in 1922. It was Tagore who had established the Institute of Rural Reconstruction in that year.