Children Of 'Green Gurukul', The Next Generation Of Climate Change Warriors

Climate change has increased levels of uncertainty about our future. Therefore, it becomes imperative for the younger generation to be involved in conversations about climate change and in its mitigation and adaptation.

To make sure that the young population becomes valuable contributors to climate action rather than victims of it, an Uttarakhand-based non-government organisation, Waste Warriors, has been running a community activation programme known as ?Green Gurukul'.

It is an inter-school holistic student interaction programme that mobilises school students for taking environmental action through a range of activities and initiatives. It is designed to bring together schools to help raise awareness on various environmental issues, including climate change and waste management.

Under the initiative, the NGO runs a Green Campus Programme, which is currently active in government schools of Himachal Pradesh. Under this, they set up a holistic solid waste management system that focuses on fostering knowledge about climate change among children.

The project has an integrated approach, wherein they engage students in interactive sessions through different mediums be it movie screening, games, and quiz competitions about climate change, skits and other thought provoking activities.

The NGO has put innovative products in the school so that students can practise what they are taught in the classrooms, including Gullaks, which tin-like structures that are provided so that the students learn to store dry waste in a segregated form; Waste Pouch, wherein the children learn to reuse old cloth by transforming it into a pouch that they can carry with them wherever they go and use it to store the waste instead of littering it around.

The initiative is run among the students from Class 6 to Class 12. The programme is run in the government schools of Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand.

To make the initiative more interactive, the NGO keeps conducting fun sessions, like a rap competition, which they conducted online last year, to raise awareness about waste.

The session witnessed the participation of multiple students from different schools in Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand.

Initially, there were around 22 schools and 3,223 students who became a part of this programme. Today, there are more than nearly 39000 students from more than 70 schools in the last seven years that are a part of Green Gurukul.