Indian children trade trash for tuition

Schools find novel ways of cleaning the environment amid global warming

Deep in eastern India, Kajal Kumari starts her school day in the morning by picking up trash in her village. What she collects makes up her family's payment for her school fees.

About 250 of her schoolmates at Padampani School in Bodh Gaya in Bihar state pay their fees the same way. It is quite a sight to see the schoolchildren picking up waste materials from their villages and along the roads on their way to school every day.

School principal Meera Mehta explained that this is the only tuition cost for the students. "The objective is to inculcate a sense of responsibility among the children so that they could know about the impact of global warming and environmental hazards.

Kumari is the daughter of Mahesh Manjhi, who works as a soil-cutting laborer. She studies in Grade V. Before this school offered the program a year ago, Kumari's dream of formal schooling seemed impossible since her family was too poor to pay for the monthly tuition fees of $29, a normal standard for a student enrolled in a privately-run school.

The bizarre idea of a school charging only waste collection in return for tuition fees has expanded the horizons of Ganesh Kumar too. The son of a barber, Ganesh was often found loitering on the streets with his village friends while his father hopped from one place to another, cutting villagers' hair or shaving heads of Hindu pilgrims. But today the boy is studying at the school.

The collected trash is recycled and the money collected from the sale of the recycled wastes is spent on the teaching facilities. Yet that money hardly meets all the school's expenses. But its unique initiative has attracted many environment-conscious people who have donated funds.

"Environment is something which concerns all of us and so we kept our main focus on this while setting up this school. Now the local villagers are slowly coming to know the importance of conserving environment," the school's project director, Manoranjan Prasad Samdarshi, said by phone.

The idea has served twin purposes. "While the areas around our school have got cleared of wastes, the poor children have got the opportunity to study in school," Samdarshi added. "You can't expect the government to do everything. We too have to be conscious for environment," he said. The school provides teaching to the students from Class I to Class VIII.

A school in the capital of eastern state of Assam has been running a similar program since 2016. Akshar Forum School, located at Pamohi village Guwahati, launched the program with the objective of training students to "earn a livelihood by being responsible to the government."

"I still remember how our classrooms would be filled with toxic fumes every time someone in the nearby areas would burn plastics," school co-founder Parmita Sarma told the media, adding, "Here it was a norm to burn waste plastic to keep warm. We wanted to change that and so started to encourage our students to bring their plastic waste as school fees."

Authorities said the Indian schools are slowly becoming conscious of their natural environment, thanks to government encouragement and social support. Many schools in India are slowly focusing on waste management as the environmental hazards grow. It's no longer rare to find teams of students go door-to-door to collect or search through garbage, plastic bottles, cardboard waste and discarded items which could be recycled.

Last year the federal environment ministry urged schools across India to abandon all plastic materials such as water bottles, bags, cups, plates, jugs, folders trays or pencil boxes and earn "plastic-free" certificates. A total of 2,863 schools from 29 Indian states and five Union territories registered for a Green Schools Program environmental audit and 1,193 of them submitted their completed audit reports to the nonprofit organization Center for Science and Environment.

And 13 schools out of 34 shortlisted schools were presented annual green awards for 2018. Among the top winners were two schools from Kerala and one each from Bihar, Haryana and Rajasthan states. They were cited for their low water usage, energy efficiency, low waste generation and harvesting and recycling of water.

Likewise, the state government in the eastern Indian state of Orissa has decided to include a chapter on water and wastewater management at the secondary level to raise awareness about the different aspects of sanitation and hygiene practices.

The author is a freelance journalist for China Daily.