Because the Saturday solar rises over Bengaluru’s towering buildings, kids of the Glowing Mindz World College are caught up in a busy morning routine. They get up at 5, prepare, and go away for his or her vacation spot of the week — a lake, a metro station, or a bustling neighbourhood — the place they host their weekly interactive workshops and sport stalls on environmental conservation.
These college students have recently been mastering a balancing act. They spend hours drawing parallels between the water disaster that hit Bengaluru this summer time and the floods that engulfed town only a month in the past. The distinction is stark sufficient to boost some eyebrows and lots of questions.
Because of the curriculum at their faculty, these college students know how one can ask the appropriate questions just like the again of their hand. “When adversity strikes, it impacts a toddler in numerous methods. It may possibly make them really feel helpless. Therefore, there’s a want for purpose-driven motion the place kids can see past themselves,” Sreeja Iyer, founder and CEO of Glowing Mindz, tells The Higher India.
With the distinction in query, it made good sense for Sreeja and the scholars to have a look at the problem in a holistic sense. And so, they began peeling again the layers. Right here’s how the scholars are charting (and even implementing!) options to navigate the skinny line between the shortage and abundance of water in Bengaluru.
From curiosity to readability: Unpacking Bengaluru’s water woes
However first, it’s value pondering: Why have faculty college students got down to resolve water points? Don’t they’ve their principle classes to revise?
Properly, their efforts are a pure extension of the ethos of Glowing Mindz, which defines itself as a “progressive, child-centric alternate faculty”. And the establishment is giving all of them the appropriate sensible assignments.
At Glowing Mindz, college students aged between 14 and 17 are known as ‘Unicorns’, the very best degree within the faculty’s age-based hierarchy. The journey begins with toddlers as ‘Guppies’ and progresses by ‘Pups’, ‘Calves’, ‘Cubs’, ‘Joeys’, ‘Dolphins’, ‘Leopards’, and ‘Falcons’, culminating within the ‘Unicorns’.
Because the Unicorns pull out some knowledge from their latest work, Sreeja explains that it’s commonplace for Bengaluru to face such climatic unpredictabilities, however the issue lies in how younger folks view it from a really floor degree. Within the metropolis’s try and safeguard its weak, they’re simply given a vacation from faculty.
“However in that act of safety, who’s addressing their reactions in direction of these calamities? This compelled our kids to surprise: Why does Bengaluru flood when it rains? And why are most youngsters detached in direction of it?” she says.
Aashna Sankar, a scholar, observes a profound hole in entry to understandable info that youngsters can depend on to border an understanding of such points and thus change their mindsets. “Don’t kids need to know? Don’t kids have a voice? The city planning of our metropolis impacts our lives a lot, however we don’t have a say in it. We wish kids to grasp what is going on to their metropolis.” She gasps for breath as she emphasises ‘city planning’.
The planning concern additional tickled the curiosity of the scholars when Mihika Jain, a 16-year-old scholar at their faculty, missed her Trinity Communication Abilities Examination due to that exact day’s visitors, which was paralysed because of floods.
However how did they join floods and concrete planning, you ask? The reply lies in a narrative that begins with the ‘Changemaker Missions’ that the scholars of Glowing Mindz embark on as a part of their curriculum.
These missions permit the youngsters to use their learnings within the “here-and-now” to unravel real-world issues. One such mission is ‘TRUI: Tinker, Scale back, Reuse and Recycle, Upcycle, and Innovate’, below which they’re circling from inquiries to solutions and again to extra inquiries to crack open grassroots options to the water disaster and the floods.
To strategise their actions for these missions, the scholars depend on a design-thinking course of known as the ‘Issues to Initiatives’ or ‘P2P’. This mannequin equips the stakeholders (the scholars) with the abilities and information wanted to sort out the difficulty. It has eight phases: collect, map, empathise, outline, ideate, check and prototype, operations, and advertising and marketing/showcase/analysis.
“It’s not a top-down method. They arrive at issues,” Sreeja explains.
To take step one to positively change kids’s worldview of their metropolis and its calamities, they started with preschoolers, who had been requested to let their ideas about Bengaluru roam uncaged on a sheet of paper. The drawings had been filled with aversive thought bubbles like, “Go away, says Bengaluru”, “Pothole metropolis!”, and “Too many individuals, an excessive amount of air pollution”.
It was clear that the youngsters solely had a surface-level reference to their metropolis, and that drove all of the apathy. “That was not going to assist them turn out to be change brokers. Soccer floor, condo park, condo mates, and college — this was all they may think about once they thought of Bengaluru.” Sreeja says.
Sreeja and the staff shortly determined to take them on journeys across the metropolis, which got here to be generally known as ‘Little one within the Metropolis’ walks. The Unicorns additionally accompanied them. They had been additionally taken to lakes, with Jakkur Lake being an often-visited web site.
Whereas the youthful kids labored on increasing their horizons concerning the metropolis, Bengaluru was hit with a water disaster, with lake rejuvenation efforts already within the works. So the Unicorns made no ado in dashing to specialists and stakeholders with their questions.
Bridging gaps, one dialog at a time
“We spoke to farmers, environmentalists, hydrologists, folks on the Bangalore Growth Authority, and native volunteers — lots of people who had been stakeholders in lake rejuvenation. We even interviewed the staff at a sustainable design agency to grasp the function that building and concrete planning need to play. We additionally studied the work completed by Jala Poshan, a citizen participation programme, to rejuvenate Jakkur Lake, and we had been so fascinated with the impression that frequent folks can result in,” Mihika shares.
The insights from these conversations got here collectively, with threads of data fastidiously untangled. Patterns had been recognized, and scripts had been crafted. Armed with highly effective messages, the scholars stepped out to present the lake a voice.
“We did a present for our annual day which was introduced in Jakkur Lake’s personal voice within the context of the water disaster, Jakkur being an instance of town’s lakes. It was known as ‘Bengaluru, As soon as a Metropolis of Lakes’, and we depicted the significance of lake rejuvenation and lakes typically for our metropolis. We carried out it at completely different locations throughout town. It even had a dance!” Simran, a scholar, recollects.
The impression of the work didn’t finish there. It manifested once more within the type of footfall for his or her Saturday morning consciousness workshops and stalls. “The kids have additionally launched weekly heritage walks across the metropolis, held each Sunday and open to everybody. These walks provide an opportunity to rediscover Bengaluru’s hidden heritage by landmarks like Ulsoor Lake, Cubbon Park, and Nandi Durg. They’ve even ready treasure cues to make the expertise extra participating, and brought the lead in getting all this completed,” Sreeja says with a proud smile.
Glowing Mindz college students had been simply within the midst of performing snippets of Bengaluru, As soon as a Metropolis of Lakes in numerous corners of town. “It was like we had been translating the lake’s feelings into human language,” Sabreesh, one other scholar, says. His benchmate, Nikhil, provides that that they had even began work within the faculty, like creating recharge pits and making preparations for water harvesting, to be sure that they had been water-sufficient within the face of one other water disaster.
However who knew that not many months later, they’d be listening to Mihika share her story about how floods within the metropolis made her miss her Trinity examination.
“By then, we knew that this was all half of a bigger drawback. It was time for interviews once more,” Mihika says. Out got here the identical notepads that they had used throughout the water disaster. Nonetheless, a brand new web page and a few new questions noticed the scholars scratching their heads on their technique to meet the specialists.
“They went to the identical folks, however the questions had been very in a different way mapped. The method was totally new and far deeper than the final time,” Sreeja recollects.
Dr A N Yellappa Reddy, a famend environmentalist and former IFS officer, would inform the scholars, “Water wants house to stroll, crawl, leap, hop, and trickle within the metropolis. Right this moment, it solely runs; and it runs off.”
He would additional level out that 95% of water in Bengaluru now runs off, a stark improve in comparison with the 15-20% only a few years in the past. Sreeja continues, “Up to now, the bottom was not paved, and building supplies had been permeable. With urbanisation, nevertheless, a concrete jungle has emerged, leaving no house for water to seep into the bottom.”
“The place will the water go, then?” Dr Reddy had requested.
Ripples of change: Turning concepts into motion
And so started the entangling and detangling of extra threads. The scholars had the arduous job of connecting the dots between the water disaster and the floods.
Lakshita, a scholar, noticed a definite connection between their faculty coursework and the questions they had been looking for solutions to. “In particular science, we discovered concerning the kinds of rain. Our science curriculum helped us perceive Bengaluru’s structure and the supplies it was constructed with. For measuring rain, we turned to maths. And to grasp folks’s views, social science got here to the rescue,” she says, her eyes gleaming as she attracts the parallels.
The results of this “pondering out loud,” as the scholars put it, was an in depth causal map that they made to summarise their interview outcomes. Within the centre of the map was a query written in a large font: “Why is it flooding a lot?”
“I wish to sneak you in on what we’re planning subsequent!” Archita exclaims. “Quickly, you’ll see quick articles on LinkedIn and different social media platforms concerning the options we’ve developed by our analysis. And that’s simply the tip of the iceberg. Our findings have uncovered insights that aren’t frequent information. We wish to create far-reaching change that’s by the youngsters, for the youngsters, and of the youngsters.”
Nikhil smiles ear to ear as he says, “These articles shall be such attention-grabbing reads as a result of you’re going to get a glimpse into how kids expertise and sort out issues as complicated as floods.”
Glowing Mindz is one faculty, and Bengaluru is one metropolis. “However we do have one thing bigger on the horizon. What we plan to do has three layers to it. First, we goal to construct communities of colleges, universities, and studying centres throughout the nation that share the idea that information will be gained on the go and that you simply don’t must be an skilled to unravel an issue,” says Sreeja.
“Second, I’ve an excellent feeling about multi-city functioning, the place college students from completely different cities coordinate by P2P labs to sort out region-specific challenges — reminiscent of air air pollution in Delhi — in a low-stakes setting. Third, we plan to create a broad community of specialists to equip college students with the abilities to ask the appropriate questions,” she explains.
As one other Saturday morning approaches, the scholars will wrap up their busy morning routine and head to the lakeside. The primary rays of daylight will dance on the water’s floor, their golden glow mirrored within the college students’ keen eyes.
The lake will stir gently with the quiet ripples of change these younger palms and hearts start to create.
Edited by Pranita Bhat; All photos courtesy Sreeja Iyer
