In 2012, environmental activist, Jyoti Raghavan Khanduja, was returning from a family vacation in Jim Corbett National Park back to her home in Gurugram. As her car neared the Ghazipur landfill, a sharp stench sliced through the already polluted air, conjuring a dystopian image as if straight from Charles Dickens’ Hard Times. “It was a horrendous sight. There was a monster of garbage there.
It was a wake-up call to create a community of conscious children who are ready to tackle future challenges — poor waste management, rising pollution, water crisis, food shortages, labour crises and other such problems. I wanted them to be concerned for the environment right from the start,” she says as she walks me around the vast expanse of her new community-driven school Forest Spirit Learning, in the foothills of the forested Aravalli mountain range in Shikohpur, Gurugram.
The recently completed school — attended by over 100 children since its opening in July — unlike any school that one has come across in textbooks. Imagine urban youngsters lugging bundles of bamboo to learn about eco-friendly construction, picking and segregating waste, farming native fruits and vegetables, conserving water, and being involved in fun-filled activities like beekeeping, cooking, carpentry, astronomy nights under the stars, flexing their strength during martial arts like Kalaripayattu or maybe just climbing trees in leisure. In other words, it’s a hub of unlearning and unschooling. The learning seems all play and less or no work! Khanduja tells TMS about her journey and how she turned into an eco-warrior.
Making of an activist
We sit atop a mound of dry earth that gave a panoramic view of the school. Khanduja picks up some dry soil, which is gradually whisked away by the cool breeze as she begins to recount how she made a career shift. “I was content writing for brands that would align with my philosophy of being environmentally friendly. But my activism began, when I became a mother of two daughters. I see children as future policymakers and started giving talks on forest conservation, sustainable living, composting, and bioenzymes in schools and colleges in Delhi-NCR.
But I realised there was a big disconnect between children and nature,” the 48-year-old Delhi University graduate shares. “Children would attend such sessions only because it was compulsory as part of their school’s curriculum. Such sessions left no impact on them as such. For instance, they did not know what’s the urgency to save trees — perhaps because they have never climbed one! A tree is an ecosystem in itself. And how did I learn that? By climbing them,” she smiles, adding that she’s also fighting legal cases to save the Aravallis from illegal mining and encroachment.
Nature’s child
Pointing to one of the Jamun trees, she takes us 40 years back to her home in West Delhi’s Janakpuri, where she would lose herself in her verandah of sweet memories. “During my childhood days, the houses used to have a big verandah. Mine had banana, mango and guava trees planted there. While climbing them I used to witness bird nests and tiny chicks. But Delhi at that time was very different from what it is now a landscape of sweeping high-rises that led to deforestation,” she tells TMS.
A filament from her memory is now manifested in the hundreds of trees she has planted in the field of her school ranging from fruity ones like mango, guava, papaya, and banana to even spices like cardamom, turmeric, curry leaves and carom and flowering plants like rose. “When I used to be bored as a kid, I used to play hopscotch with my friends or devise a game of our own using discarded items as props there was so much creativity in boredom! Today, we fill in the free time with doom-scrolling,” she says, adding that today’s kids are dealing with a lot of stress pertaining to digitisation, peer pressure, school workload. “Children are going into therapy at a young age, but I feel nature is the biggest therapy. This school is an attempt to connect them with nature.”
A daring animal lover
Khanduja is not your usual animal lover, she’s the real deal when it comes to walking on the wild side. If adopting three street dogs and two cats was not enough, she rescued reptiles as dangerous as the Cobra, mongoose and even Nilgai, the largest antelope in Asia. “My locality Malibu Towne in Gurugram has many bungalows, some of which are crumbling. When one digs deep in such bungalows, snakes come out of burrows because it’s their natural habitat overtaken by human development,” she shares, adding that snakes are highly intelligent creatures.
“They know when you’re trying to save them and they become harmless at that time,” she says about rescuing one. “I have encouraged my locality’s residents to not kill animals on such chance encounters and safely move them out. I want to awaken that inherent compassion in children for animals that get lost due to social conditioning of fearing or showing hatred towards them.”
For a greener future
Khanduja gives us a tour of her dream project, Forest Spirit Learning. It’s sectioned into three areas — a hut-shaped school to hold workshops and classes, a pond that supports aquatic life and a field that shows the farm-to-plate process. “We used clay, mud, straw, bamboo sticks and discarded glass bottles for its construction.
The pond with water hyacinth attracts dragonflies and aquatic life like frogs that eat mosquito eggs. The pond is a reflection of how nature creates a balance in the ecosystem and when we disrupt it, it comes to haunt us. For example, the rising cases of dengue and malaria due to excessive mosquitoes,” she says.
While the school has a good response, enquiries are in on upcoming workshops. “I am planning to do a workshop on sewing buttons to your sleeve and repairing minor wear and tear of clothes as repair is a big part of sustainable living and helps minimise waste. Next on the plan is beekeeping.
For me, bees are the most important creatures on the earth as they are the pollinators. They are the first link in the entire food chain and worthy of attention,” she says, equipping children to shape a bright and green future.