Srinagar: Continuing its “Catch Them Young” campaign, the Peoples’ Environmental Council (PEC) held a training programme for the students of Government Higher Secondary School Athoora in north Kashmir’s Baramulla district.
The campaign, supported by the Islamic University of Science and Technology (IUST), aims to prepare young students for environmental leadership.
The training programme started with a three-hour-long interaction with the students within the school premises. During this session, PEC members Prof. Arshad Jahangir, Sakib Qadri, Mubarek Gul and Athar Parvaiz interacted with the students giving details about how environmental awareness can be created among the student community and implemented effectively in “our day to day lives” besides preparing students for contributing to environmental policy-making in the long run. Dr. Asima Tanveer of Government Degree College Baramulla, who was also part of the panel, delivered a detailed talk.
The panelists identified the crucial environmental challenges such as plastic and water pollution facing the Kashmir valley and highlighted the importance of the student community’s role in dealing with those challenges successfully.
A number of questions were asked by the students which were answered by the PEC members in detail. Some of the important questions asked by the students included those about continuing environmental problems and lack of successful implementation of environmental laws and the role of smaller regions around the world including Kashmir in dealing with the challenges posed by climate change.
Balbir Singh Raina, Chief Education Officer, Baramulla, who was the chief guest on the occasion and Principal of the institution, Abdul Rashid Malik appreciated the creative skills of the students who had created models about addressing environmental pollution and distributed certificates of merit among the students. Raina made it a point to interact with each student who had created the models and urged them to keep up their creative work.
Later, the students were taken to a site at River Jhelum in Baramulla town where Prof. Arshad Jahangir and Dr. Asima Tanveer practically demonstrated it to the students with the help of laboratory equipment as to how pollution impacts the quality of water.
In his message to the students, Dr. Khurshid A Salman, chairman of PEC said that the basic aim of exposing the students to the practical side of environmental pollution “is to make students to see for themselves as seeing is believing.”
He added that once the students are convinced about the consequences of environmental pollution,it will motivate them “to think creatively about finding solutions to environmental problems and become part of the process required for dealing with our environmental challenges.” Helping students to take leadership roles, he said, is a must to deal with the environmental problems and climate change.