Click to play videoBoormajra (Punjab): At a school in rural Punjab, actions speak louder than words, especially when it comes to the environment. Recently named the 'greenest' school in the country by the Centre for Science and Environment, the Government Senior Secondary School in Boormajra is a model of environmental conservation.
A student of the school, Manvinder Kaur says, "Hamen bataya gaya tha ki hum agar environment ko destroy karenge to environment hamein destroy karega." ("Our teachers told us that if we destroy the environment, the environment will destroy us.")
The strategy employed by the school is simple — reduce, reuse and recycle. The 60 students in the school's eco-club try to cut down on wastage of resources like land, water and energy, and turn waste into an asset.
With a grant of just Rs 2,500 from the state government, the school has managed to conduct extensive audits of waste and electricity consumption, segregate its waste and convert it into manure.
One of the teachers, Baljeet Kaur, who helped set up the club two years back, says progress has been rapid.
"When I started with this concept the students did not even know what 'eco' meant. They thought I was saying echo," she says.
Within two years of the club's formation, the school's water consumption is down from 3.82 litres per person to 2.5. litres and the electricity consumption has fallen by nearly 100 kilowatt-hours each month. Apart from this, the school's green cover has almost doubled.
While most of the schools in the country are still struggling to make environment education a compulsory subject in accordance to the 2004 Supreme Court guidelines, this small school in a hamlet in Punjab was not only able to make it an integral part of their curriculum, but also able to do was take environment education out of these textbooks and classrooms and take them outside on the fields.
And when the students leave school, they will take with them an important lesson — that no effort goes to waste, and change, while slow, is definitely possible.
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