Guwahati: There is no school in the country which accepts plastic wastes as school fees except the one in the capital city of Assam. Akshar School situated in the outskirts of Guwahati, Pamohi accepts plastic wastes as the only mode of fees from the students.
The children of the school don't come only with bags full of books but they also bring plastics full of polythene as school fees. The students of the school deposits 10-20 plastic items per week as a fee structure with a pledge to not burn plastic.
Founder of Akshar School Parmita Sarma said that they wanted to start a free school for children but stumbled upon the idea after they realized a larger social and ecological problem brewing in this area. She said, "I still remember how our classrooms were filled with toxic fumes every time somebody in the nearby areas burnt plastics. It was a norm to burn waste plastic to keep warm and we want to change that and therefore, we have started encouraging our students to bring their plastic waste as school fees," said Sarma.
The Akshar School was founded in the year 2016 by Parmita Sarma and Mazin Mukhtar and the school has been giving formal education to more than 100 children belonging to an economically backward category. The school also provides vocational skill training besides regular subjects of Science, Geography, Mathematics etc.
Mazin also said that the foremost challenge which they faced while starting the school was to convince the villagers to send their kids to school as most of them worked in the stone quarries as labourers to earn for their family members. In order to fulfill the child's needs and build a creative pipeline of employment, they designed the curriculum in that manner post education.
He further said that the students earn Rs. 150-Rs200 per day at the stone quarries. The school made a rule that the older students will teach the younger students which serves two purposes. One, it makes them feel valued and important and secondly, they can have less number of teachers.
The school also aims to educate the community about the harmful effects of burning plastic with the help of the students. They teach the villagers to recycle the waste and become agents of change. The students also make numerous construction materials with plastic waste with the help of the teachers.
Initially, the school had only 20 kids but now it has more than 100 children studying in the school. It has eight bamboo huts to run their classes and two digital classrooms donated by some people.
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