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Awards given to 20 schools in India for best environmental practices

By himalayanreview
 
20 December 2007 New Delhi: Located in a small hamlet in Boormajra in Punjab’s Ropar district, a government school was adjudged as India’s greenest school for the second time. The second and third prizes went to Government Secondary School, Daramdin, Sikkim and Apeejay School, Pitampura, New Delhi respectively.

At a ceremony here in New Delhi on December 17, Prof Krishna Kumar, director, National Council for Educational Research and Training gave Green School Awards 2007 to all 20 schools short-listed from all over the country.

Gobar Times Green School Programme (GSP) was started last year by the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), a non-profit organisation. Sunita Narain, director, of CSE, explained the reason behind starting the programme: “We started this programme because we very strongly believed that the environmental issue was going to be absolutely critical in India and that this issue would determine the future of our country.”

With this objective in mind, the CSE team went about helping teachers and students to take stock of environment and natural resource management within schools, suggest steps to improve performance, and ensure implementation of these steps for a better school habitat and more environmentally aware and involved school community.

Prof Krishna Kumar appreciated the efforts of the CSE in launching this kind of programme, which, according to him, was now transforming into a movement. “It has an enormous potential to create hope and combat cynicism which you find prevalent today given the fact that there is so big a crisis facing us,” he said.

“The kind of enthusiasm that I see around me is symbolic of a much larger energy, which this programme has triggered,” he added.

GSP coordinator Sumita Dasgupta pointed out the remarkable achievement of the programme in such a short period. She informed that from 1,200 schools last year, the number of schools covered under the programme had gone up to 3,500 this year.

Not only that, the training of teachers went up from 300 to 600 and the urban-rural ratio tripled during this period. She added that increasing participation of government-run schools in both rural and urban areas suggested that the environment as an issue of concern was coming out of the fold of elitism.

Applauding the performance of the Boormajra school, the statement released by the CSE reads: “The students and teachers [here] have outdone themselves. The award has gone to it because the school has been able to grasp the message that the GSP seeks to promote: it is practising sustainable use of natural resources and constantly looking out for new and more innovative ways of managing them. The school has now set up a rainwater harvesting system with the help of funds from the state
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