NEW DELHI: Government Girls Secondary School in Chhatarpur is located in the rocky Aravalli zone where water is scanty. Still the students maintain 105 species of native plants on the school premises. Not only that, there is no borewell but only proper management of MCD water that these girls depend on.
In far west, Salwan Public School at Old Rajinder Nagar recycles paper to make files for administrative use. The students have planted trees on the central verge under the metro bridge stretching from Rajendra Place to Karol Bagh. They even made cloth bags from scrap material and went out to different markets on Sundays to offer them to shoppers using polythene bags.
Rainwater harvesting, waste management, tree plantation, conserving energy were mere chapters in the environmental sciences book till a few schools in the city turned them into practice. Seventeen of them were given the annual Gobar Times Green Schools award by the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) on Friday for their efforts to make sure that the environment lands up in wise hands tomorrow. Five city schools were awarded for making a change over the past few years while five others were felicitated for a successful debut in the Green Schools Programme launched by CSE in 2006. While Salwan Public School (Morning) topped the list of change-makers in the city, the school in Chhatarpur became the best resource manager for effective conservation of land. Other change-makers were St George's School at Alakhnanda, Sadhu Vaswani School, The Pinnacle School at Panchsheel Enclave and Deepalaya School near Kalkaji.
"We have been associated with the green school programme for the past five years. Our students and the environment teacher are really passionate and motivated for this cause. In fact, we had started the plantation drive back in 1993. In 2003, we planted nearly 10,000 trees on either side of the Ridge though they were all uprooted on one side to build a wall for the Commonwealth Games," said Vandana Puri, principal, Salwan Public School (Morning).
Nearly 15,000 schools from 18 states are associated with the green school programme. Of these, 144 qualified for the assessment for awards. There were 20 national toppers this year, including Salwan and St George's from Delhi. Dolly Malhotra, a teacher and eco-club coordinator at St George's, said: "We segregate waste and use it to make vermicompost. Our building is also designed in a way that we have enough sunlight and we do not need to switch on lights most of the times. We have also linked such environment projects with continuous and comprehensive evaluation in school."
According to CSE, schools have gone beyond token gestures for conserving environment. "They are real-time managers now. They took stock of the situation, identified problems, found solutions and are making an impact now. Many have switched to clean transport system, 100% change-maker schools have declared themselves as zero-waste zones while 70% of them are making a shift as far as energy conservation is concerned," said Sumita Dasgupta, programme director at CSE.
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