From the Alliance for Good Governance (AGG), which is a collective of several organizations including Sri Aurobindo Society, PondyCAN, Pondicherry Science Forum, HOPE and many more, we are back with a new edition of the Water Festival christened WaterFest '21. This time, this is even more interesting. With over 10 government departments and over 15 civil society organizations, community organizations, and grass-roots level groups, we are also getting over more than 100 schools and the children (maybe more than 50,000 school children) and through them to more than 2 or even 3 lakh parents and the general public!!!
Exciting ..it is. So far, we have covered more than 10 schools where each school will receive the Neerkudam (a pail of water) containing waters from ponds of previous schools and in a beautiful ceremony will take a water pledge in the presence of the Neerkudam which represent all the waters (water from the water bodies of Puducherry) and in each school, water from their own a Started on 2 February 2021, which is the world wetlands day and expecting to close by 22 March 2021 which is the World Water Day, the seven weeks in between is filled with a lot of field-level action. Members of AGG and the All for Water for All collective along with the Directorate of School Education and other departments are driving one of the largest water-awareness campaigns that Puducherry has witnessed. Every participating school will identify a pond or a water body near their school and will carry out various activities around the pond including getting community support for cleaning the pond, researching the pond and its eco-systems as an experiential learning process like exploring the mathematics of a pond (dimensions, size, shape, volume, surface area, etc.), the physics and chemistry of the pond (pH of water, electrical conductivity, soil porosity, etc), biological (biological oxygen demand (BOD), chemical oxygen demand), etc), geography of the pond-eco system, history of the pond (oral history from village-elders regarding the origin, name, etc.), hydrology of the pond (its feeder systems, drainage patterns, inter-connectedness of the pond with other water bodies, etc), sociology, economics, and the list goes on. The idea is to learn from the pond-eco system in a holistic, integrated manner and in an experiential way so that children can learn from nature multiple subjects and topics which are otherwise, vertical, water-tight compartmental learning with no horizontal, cross-linkages and with absolutely no connection to their own lives or the community to which they belong.
The initiative is called One School-One Pond (OSOP) where the children will become torch-bearers of rejuvenating the natural water eco-systems and also convert the local abandoned water bodies into an eco-education centre.
