 Award ceremony [November 27, 2006] 
Press Release
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November 27, 2006
CSE awards schools
for environmental best practices
Government school in Punjab village bags top award
New Delhi, November 27, 2006: A government school in the small
hamlet of Boormajra, in Punjab’s Ropar district, has been
quietly living up to the Supreme Court’s directive on the
imperative of environmental education in schools. It has bagged
the top ‘Green Schools Award’ for its environmental practices.
The award, instituted by Centre for Science and Environment
(CSE), was conferred here today by Professor Krishna Kumar,
director, NCERT.
The next best awards have gone to Sholai School, Kodaikanal, and
Evergreen Public School, located in New Delhi’s Vasundhara
Enclave – in that order.
The schools have been awarded under CSE’s Gobar Times Green
Schools Programme. Across the country, about 1,200 schools are
using CSE’s Green Schools Manual to benchmark their
environmental performance. Under this programme, schools audit
their water use, waste generation, their efforts in
rainwater harvesting, in recycling, in conserving energy, in
using public transport etc. This then enables the students to
prepare a report card of their school’s performance.
Speaking on the occasion, Sunita Narain, director, CSE, said:
“Environment is the world’s greatest teacher. But to learn from
it, we have to practice what we believe is possible, and
experiment with what we know should be done… CSE’s Green Schools
Programme is a way of learning about our environment, about the
resources that we use, about identifying our needs so that we
can distinguish them from our greed. Because only then can we
find ways of limiting our wants and reducing our waste so that
we can turn green.”
The aim of this rating has been, in particular, to understand
what can be done to improve the schools’ performance on its
environmental sustainability index and implement these steps in
the coming years. Sumita Dasgupta, coordinator, environment
education unit, CSE, pointed out: “The report cards are a way
for teachers and students to understand their own environment
and to use the tools of learning to map the changes that are
needed.”
The Boormajra-based school has won the top prize for
implementing futuristic techniques for water management within
its premises: it harvests wastewater from taps – the spillage of
drinking water – and reuses about 55 per cent of it. The school
has also collected precise data about the modes of transport
(mostly non-polluting) that its students and staff use.
Sholai School, rated second best, derives most of its energy
from micro-hydel, solar and biogas sources, and has collected
precise information about energy consumption on campus. Also,
most of the waste produced by the school is recycled within the
campus. Evergreen Public School, third in the list, is one of
the few schools in Delhi doing complete rainwater harvesting. It
also recycles the water from spillage, and has done an audit of
the flora and fauna on campus.
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