Under the ‘Green Idea’ scheme  by the Environment Department, Govt of Maharashtra, oikos team has designed a set of 3 booklets to facilitate environment education for age group 10 to 12 years, especially for rural parts of the state during year 2015-16.

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Our approach has been to: 

• Develop respect towards natural resources: by sharing facts and figures

• Bring in context of local ecology : by observation of surroundings

• Know the status of natural resources & biodiversity: through mapping of surroundings

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The activities will try to inculcate this philosophy and are designed to cover various aspects such as

1. Flora-Fauna

2. Soil

3. Water

4. Ecosystem

5. Farming

6. Energy, Pollution, Industry

7. Climate and Weather

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The activities have been designed with the help of our partner organization ‘Gram Mangal’. We recommend that any teacher/parent referring to these booklets do it serially for a better understanding of the subjects. We also welcome your feedback and suggestions while conducting these activities to help us amend them wherever required.

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For more information, visit our NGO: www.adhiwas.org

We got our first break in the field of 'education', thanks to an opportunity from Gram Mangal, Pune, an NGO working in the field of education with an innovative and path breaking approach of multiple intelligence theory. We have been associated with Gram mangal since 2002.

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With 'Nature' regarded as an 'intelligence', in 2009 we started working on setting up syllabus for their curriculum along with a team from 'Ecological Society', for standard 5th to 10th. This was a very interesting and rewarding experience for our team and helped build a foundation; from designing a modular syllabus to enlisting various activities to translate the syllabus in classroom sessions, training the trainers, conducting sessions, etc. This syllabus was adopted in 'Bharat Vidyalaya', Wai, Maharashtra under the guidance of Gram Mangal team and is now being used as a base for developing various educational tools and workshops.

It is observed that city people who purchase land in countryside blindly follow certain practices like flattening the land, planting horticulture crops like Mango or the non-natives like Gulmohor, Eucalyptus etc. For an industry, APARANT Iron & Steel Ltd., in Goa, we have had an opportunity to work with various schools under their CSR program. One of our first programs which extends over the entire year at a monthly frequency. Such sessions were conducted between 2009 to 2011 by a heterogeneous team.

One of our recent workshops was in the small but strategic town of Sawai Madhopur in Rajasthan - strategic because of its proximity to one of the finest national parks in India - Ranthambhore.

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Here we conducted an introductory one week workshop for Fateh Public School students for standard 7th. It was an integrated workshop teaching ecology from a geographic, historical and social perspective along with knowing their environment. 

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The other workshop in Sawai Madhopur which will always hold a special place in our heart was for kids of Mogya tribe - a conventional poaching community in Ranthambhore. Awareness on livelihood options for these kids was equally stressed along with our regular ecology sessions. The sessions continued for a year.