Welcome to the website of the Indian Institute of Ecology and Environment (iiee), New Delhi

The Karnataka State government will introduce environment education as part of curriculum in government and aided schools. As an initial step, a pilot project that started in 100 schools has just been completed. Monitoring and assessment of the programme will be conducted in February 2005 before being introduced from the next academic year. DSERT deputy director Gurumurthy told this website’s newspaper that the Supreme Court has stated that environment should be part and parcel of school curriculum.

The New Indian Express, Bangalore, 1supp, Nov. 11, 2004

Online edition of India’s National Newspaper

Friday, Dec 19, 2003

Supreme Court wants environment in school syllabus

By J. Venkatesan

New Delhi Dec. 18. The Supreme Court today directed all the States and educational agencies in the country to introduce environment as a compulsory subject in all classes in schools up to the higher secondary level from the academic year 2004-05.

A Bench, comprising Justice N. Santosh Hegde and Justice B.P. Singh, made it clear that all States must comply with and implement the apex court’s 1991 order providing for the inclusion of environment as a subject in school and college syllabi. It warned the States that contempt proceedings would be initiated if they failed or neglected to implement the steps proposed in their respective affidavits.

It directed the National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT) to frame a model syllabus for the schools keeping in view the 1991 judgment and submit it before the court on or before April 14, 2004. The Bench said it would examine the same and if found suitable would recommend a uniform syllabus throughout the country. For the college level, it asked the University Grants Commission and the All-India Council for Technical Education to coordinate and bring out a uniform environment syllabus for the college-level course.

The Bench asked the NCERT to take the assistance of the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) in drafting the syllabus module for schools when the CPCB counsel, Vijay Panjwani, told the court that the Board was regularly publishing books, handbooks, reports and magazines on environment.

In 1991, the apex court asked the authorities to immediately take steps to enforce compulsory education on environment in a graded way from the academic year 1992-93.

Since this order was not implemented even after 12 years, the petitioner, M.C. Mehta, filed an application to ensure the implementation of the earlier order. Most of the States in their affidavits had stated that they had implemented the apex court’s order in one way or the other.

Environmental education was mandated as a compulsory subject in all schools across the country by the Supreme Court of India in 1991 following the filing of a PIL (public interest litigation) by M.C. Mehta, India’s leading environmental lawyer and recipient of the Magsaysay and Goldman awards. However environmentalists, especially those concerned with education in the country, are voicing apprehensions that the apex court’s order is being shabbily implemented, if at all.

In 12,000 schools affiliated to the Maharashtra State Board of Secondary and Higher Secondary Education a 100 marks environmental studies (EVS) paper has been introduced in class IX for the academic year 2005-2006, starting June, in keeping with the SC order. The subject will be taught in class X in 2006-07 when students from class IX get promoted to class X next year.

According to Dr. Rashneh Pardiwala director of the Mumbai based NGO, Centre for Environment Research and Education (CERE) and former scientific advisor to the World Wild Life Fund for Nature (WWF) and Scientists for Global Responsibility (SGR), this belated and lukewarm proposal of the state examination board side-steps the apex court’s order. “We have spoken to Mr. Mehta on the topic and together with him are going to continue our fight to set it right,” she says.

The original Supreme Court order, issued in 1991 mandated compulsory environment education to fulfill the fundamental duty of citizens to “protect and improve the natural environment,” as set out in the Constitution of India. In 2004, Mehta successfully re-petitioned the Supreme Court of India to enforce the 1991 court decision making environment studies a compulsory subject at all levels - primary and secondary - within the school system with separate time allocation. In his fight for effective environment education, Mehta has been consistently backed by CERE, which, through the data received from its on-going project ‘Documenting Successful Models of Environmental Education across India’ keeps him informed about implementation progress of the Supreme Court order across the country. According to Katy Rustom, a well-known Mumbai based environment activist, who co-promoted CERE with Pardiwala in 2001, environment education mandated by the apex court is currently “in a complete mess”. “School managements across the country don’t have a clue about what they are supposed to do and often take the easy option of dishing out perfunctory environment education to their students,” she expostulates.

In its 1991 order the Supreme Court had directed the central agencies of the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), the University Grants Commission (UGC) as well as the All India Council for Technical Education to put their heads together to formulate a well-graded curriculum for schools and colleges. To this end NCERT took the assistance of NGOs, environmental educationists and other experts in the country and formulated an “action-oriented” curriculum. However, the state examination boards felt that it would be impossible to train their numerous teachers and therefore the subject should be taught through textbooks.

Explaining CERE’s stand, Pardiwala says: “Good environment education requires more than providing mere scientific data on global environment problems in textbooks. Children must be taught and equipped with practical skills to lead environmentally sustainable lives from early childhood so that as adults they will incorporate environmentally sound practices and habits in their daily lives. CERE will assist Mehta and ensure that whichever board or state does not address this subject seriously is taken to task for contempt of court.”

With the UN having declared the period 2005-14 as the Decade of Education for a Sustainable Future and with runaway consumerism threatening to suck the earth dry, the need for well designed syllabuses and curriculums to be implemented in letter and spirit by education institutions has become pressing. Educationists and school managements need to give this neglected subject the attention it deserves. The future of this nation as a hospitable habitation depends upon it.

Call it the apathy of the Indian media to environmental issues, blame an obsession with flamboyant trivia such as India’s rare cricket win over Australia, or view it as a measure of how much the media care about education: An important recent mandate by the Supreme Court to “green” curricula at all levels of education received barely any commentary, and only skimpy reports confined to obscure corners of national newspapers.

Tracing the history of the case that culminated in the December 18 court order may itself constitute an academic exercise of sorts. One would have to go all the way back to 1991 when the court responded favorably to a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) that M C Mehta - perhaps the world’s best-known environmental lawyer - had filed pleading the court to order education bodies to introduce environmental studies as a compulsory subject at all levels of Indian education.

Mehta had made the plea invoking clause (g) of article (51 A) of the constitution, “with a view to educating the people of India about their social obligation in matter of upkeep of the environment in proper shape and making them alive to their obligation not to act as polluting agencies or factors”. Headed Fundamental Duties, article (51 A) was incorporated into the Indian constitution through an amendment in 1976; its clause (g) “requires every citizen to protect and improve the natural environment including forests, lakes, rivers and wild life and to have compassion for all living creatures”.

In its order, delivered on November 22, 1991, the court had directed the central government, states, union territories and educational organizations responsible for prescribing syllabi to comply with its ruling by the academic year 1992-1993; it had also mandated commercial cinema halls to allow a minimum number of free slide shows on the theme of environmental protection and asked authorities to cancel the licenses of errant halls. However, in a not unusual display of government agencies’ indifference to environmental concerns - especially as expressed within the generally neglected realm of education - the directive was anything but honored.

So Mehta petitioned the court again on July 21, 2003, whereupon the court issued notices to the same state agencies, seeking their responses regarding the implementation of its 1991 order. The court failed to receive responses from all the parties within the stipulated time; so on September 22 it slapped a fine of Rs 15, 000 (US$329) each on the 10 defaulting states, which it also asked to file affidavits. Out of those 10 states, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Haryana failed to oblige even thereafter; so on October 28 the court summoned their chief secretaries to answer “why contempt of court proceedings not be initiated against them for deliberately disobeying the court orders”. (About a month later, on November 25, the court also had to issue notices to Tamil Nadu regarding contradictions in its request for exemptions from filing the affidavit before the deadline; on December 9, the chief secretary apologized in that regard on behalf of that state).

On December 18, in resuming the hearing of Mehta’s PIL, the court ordered all of the same agencies to implement the same old directive: now from the 2004-2005 academic year. The situation now, however, is a little different: This time the court has taken it on itself to oversee the process directly, one of whose chief elements includes for it to approve the syllabi that the agencies are ordered to turn in by April 14.

The court’s order, though its own rehash with a fresh and mandatory urgency, has a wider context than has been acknowledged in the press. (Of course, as noted earlier, the Indian press has relegated this whole issue to insignificance, even at the level of news.) A number of factors actually point to the probability that the order at best extends and empowers the vapid and, in many ways, crudely technocratic Indian bureaucracy; at worst, it outclasses the bureaucracy in its lack of imagination and anti-democratic paternalism.

For one, it is ludicrous for the court to assume that the myriad agencies that have dishonored it for the past 12 years would now be excited about and capable of activating - genuinely teaching - the syllabi in classrooms once they are designed and introduced. Short of that, how is the court going to ensure anything significant in the sensitive area of education? The court’s own answer is of course increased and closer supervision: but is that the answer or a mere bureaucratic imitation - hence prolonging - of the larger bureaucracy called the government of India it has sought to rectify?

The fact of the matter is that the Indian education system, a single but formidable component of the government, is an unwieldy bureaucracy still firmly rooted in the colonial past: Qualitatively it was the branch of British colonial government entrusted to breed clerks and petty officials to serve the Crown; administratively it was and continues to be highly centralized, even though India has a large number of universities, most of which are geographically divided into small colleges.

Anybody who has an Indian education is likely to agree that most of it is based on learning by rote and time-bound annual exams. In such a system, enlightened awareness and ethical consciousness of any kind are hard to impart, cultivate, and reward: Individual teachers have neither the authority nor the training to design their own syllabi or even exams. The exams, in most cases occurring only once at the end of the academic year, typically appear as question papers secretly designed by teachers discretely picked up by central committees; as for their delivery, students sit for three grueling hours to handwrite answers they are supposed to have imbibed along the year through memorization: to time-tested questions constituting the papers.

Contrary to what India’s educated class would like to believe (despite its often vocal internal complaints and skepticism): the mainstream Indian education system typically desensitizes and standardizes otherwise curious young minds - students and freshly appointed teachers alike. Complementing this counter-creativity machine are the numerous standardized competitive exams that high school and college graduates are expected to pass in order to become anybodies from bank clerks, railway executives and insurance officials to revenue collectors with state or central government. (The great Indian family hardly helps there as it steers its young members deeper into self-centered career games for the sake of pecuniary gains.)

By deliberately pushing the theme of environment into this soulless quagmire called Indian education, the court has paved the way for the stultification of any ecological consciousness that the Indian youngster may have inherited from custom and spiritual traditions. Worse, after going through the mandatory courses, the young and increasingly consumerist graduate might actually begin to believe that he knows a thing or two about the environment - more than, let’s say, the uneducated poor, the scheduled tribes, or the “ecosystem people” (a-la Madhav Gadgil and Ramchandra Guha). By virtue of that self-congratulatory myopia, he may in fact victimize India’s social ecology as well as himself. In a country that can boast of only 65.38 percent literacy, it is not difficult, especially for the quasi-urban college graduate, to consider himself smarter than the huge illiterate minority.

Here, it is difficult to resist thinking whether the court is not myopic itself: After all, it is the same court that not too long ago held activist and author Arundhati Roy guilty for a contemptibly flimsy charge of contempt of court, and which has quite a reputation for flaunting its own immunity from public criticism on the basis of the same arcane, feudalistic law traceable to the yester-century of British colonialism.

On that count, what is dreadful in the current legal instance is the way the court assumed the authority to verify and approve uniform courses on environment for such an ecologically, economically, linguistically and culturally diverse region as India. The court has sought that uniformity by directing the central agencies of the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), the University Grants Commission and the All India Council of Technical Education to coordinate among themselves; but, again, those agencies are altogether too removed from the local geographical and classroom contexts within which the courses they would suggest would be taught.

For all that, those agencies are quite likely - in some sense obligated - to present a highly statist, government-of-India view of the environment and environmental problems: in which big dams, for example, may well be touted as ecological solutions rather than the gargantuan headaches they really are. Likewise, one could also expect biotechnology, bioengineering and other high-tech, capital-intensive knowledge and infrastructures to be showcased as progressive solutions to environmental damage. One could also expect a rather urban, middle class profile of the environment - in which pollution rather than development and displacement would hold the center stage of analysis. Unsurprisingly, the court has already suggested to the aforementioned three agencies to seek advice from the Central Pollution Control Board as they design the syllabi.

No less important, however, are the presumably non-environmental issues of academic freedom, on one hand, and political freedom on the other. What arrogates the court to decide what teachers must teach in their classes, to mandate a certain thematic not only for under-age school students but also for mature adults at college? As it is, the typical Indian school kid feels, and most certainly is, overburdened mainly because he or she must learn how to compress to three momentous hours everything that has been learnt over the course of one year. The overburdening has already been cited by the state of West Bengal and the NCERT as a reason for their erstwhile reluctance to follow the court’s original directives.

However, under the new pressure, the authorities have agreed to replace some of the previous readings with environmental themes. What that shows, though, is that the solution to India’s knowledge woes - including in the environmental sector - lies in a radical decentralization and localization of education, in its being made more intimate than exam-based: But the ultimate solution may actually reside in the removal of the government monopoly over academic certification at all levels.

Last but not least, it is quite a stretch for the court to suggest that the clause (g) - which “requires every citizen to protect and improve the natural environment ... and to have compassion for all living creatures” - also requires going through government sermons on the environment, or that it is extendable to commercial establishments such as cinema halls. The imprudence in that jurisprudence is echoed by an article by Shobita Punja, “Learning to Care for their World” (The Telegraph, Kolkata, December 3, 2003). Inspired by one of the hearings through this long legal battle, Punja argues: “On the same principle we really need to make a similar petition regarding the compulsory teaching of India’s composite heritage so that every child in this country (who is privileged enough to have gone to school) knows the fundamental duties of every Indian (51A). Here too it is the responsibility of every state government to inform and teach our children how - clause (e) and (f) - to promote harmony and the spirit of brotherhood amongst all the people of India transcending religious, linguistic and regional or sectional diversities and to value and preserve the rich heritage of our composite culture”.

I have a hunch that Punja has drawn the right conclusions from the court’s verdict: It tells us to mistake state-sponsored nationalism for environmentalism.

23rd September, 2003

The Supreme Court fined 10 states for Rs 15,000 each for not responding to an apex court’s notice on a petition that said that these states have not complied with its 1991 order for introducing compulsory environmental education in schools and colleges.

A Bench of Justices N Santosh Hegde and B P Singh imposed the fine on the governments of Maharashtra, Rajasthan, West Bengal, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Assam, Goa, Jammu and Kashmir, Jharkhand and Arunachal Pradesh.

The bench gave four weeks time to these states to deposit the fine in the Registry and file their responses. The bench warned that if order were not complied with, the respective chief secretaries would be held responsible.

These states have not complied with the Supreme Court order that was issued about 12 years back. In a wide-ranging decision on November 22, 1991, the apex court had asked the University Grants Commission to prescribe a course on environment at the graduation and post-graduation level. Even Education Boards in all states were asked to introduce compulsory education on environment in a graded way up to the matriculation or even intermediate colleges.

“So far as education up to the college level is concerned, we would require every state government and every education board connected with education up to the matriculation or even intermediate colleges to immediately take steps to enforce compulsory education on environment in a graded way,” the apex court had said.

Environmental Education in India

I’d like to give you a basic idea of what education is in India. In India education is a free and fundamental right enshrined in the constitution for all children up to 14 years of age. Now that’s a very strong statement if you look at it from its purest sense. In reality there are many children who still have no access to schools and education. Legally speaking education is free and compulsory up to 14 years of age. And it’s in the constitution.

Under the national policy for education which was in 1986, the initially focus was making sure that children were getting admitted into schools. Government and NPOs just worked to admit students nonstop without following up as to what the rate of achievement was, how long they continued to stay in the schools, or what the drop out rate was. These things were never looked into. But now the focus is more on retention and achievement rather than on enrollment.

They also try to standardize education at different levels. For example the NCEIT (National Council for Education and Research in Training) is an institute that prepares school curriculums and textbooks for the whole country. This approach is a problem because you cannot have the same type of textbooks for the whole country in a country like India. There isn’t too much point in teaching children about the desert ecosystem when you have children staying in a subtropical ecosystem, and vise versa. So now NPOs are trying to play a role in helping such institutions develop curriculum, textbooks.

Basically education is free and compulsory and interventions are needed. There are institutions working to develop such textbooks and trying to integrate local environmental programs and issues into the school system.

In terms of higher education, just to give you an idea, there are 207 universities in India, which are the central universities, besides these, there are also state run universities. Universities are under what is called the Union Grants Commission, which takes care of each of this.

When we talk about environmental education, like in many parts of the world, environmental education is not a program of the education department. Countries like Australia have a much more specific focus approach. It’s a pioneer country in terms of environmental education, but in most Asian and South Asian and maybe even the larger Asian Pacific region, environmental education is still not with the ministry of education, but with the Ministry of the Environment or other related ministries. In India it is with the Ministry of Environment and Forests and the Ministry of Human Resource Development. These are the two ministries, which are pushing environmental education despite the fact that they have nothing to do with education.

Talking about the legalities, interestingly, just last week, in India, the supreme court of India literally had to force the states of India to have environmental education up to grade 12. Unfortunately, the judgment to have universal environmental education was made in 1989. Till today, it is not being implemented. So last week, the Supreme Court in a libel action sued many of the states. The suit included monetary fines to answer why states are not doing anything about environmental education.

Unfortunately, environmental education is not a priority for education departments, or even teachers. For many teachers it is not a priority. It is an additional burden, an additional subject when teachers already don’t have enough time to cover the regular curriculum. For many teachers environmental education is a science related subject. They don’t realize that it is a subject that can be taught in humanities, art and in so many other ways.

So basically environmental education is like an orphan that is nobody’s child. And when I say environmental education is like an orphan, I think it’s even so in Japan. It’s like an orphan that no one wants to say, “I’m the father,” or “I’ll take care of it.” Everyone wants to show some charity so they look good in front of others. Everyone wants to be linked somehow in environmental education, but nobody wants to take full responsibility of it. For example the education department isn’t yet.

In other experiences in India we have looked at environmental education from a number of ways. One is formal, which achieved very little. Sometimes you have textbooks and you have everything ready, but teachers are not trained to be involving themselves in environmental education.

There is also non-formal education and also a lot of environmental education activities that are donor driven. They don’t have anything to do with the country’s national policy or state policy, and some which are policy driven.

We will focus more on the non-formal and policy and donor driven activities as we go along.