MUMBAI, July 25: Close on heels of a World Bank study, underlining the reasons of India's economic losses as a result of the rapid decline of her natural resources (amounting to over Rs 34,000 crores) comes a couple of workshops in the city to educate school children to cherish the world around them.

In the last couple of days, two workshops have been organised to focus on the effective role of environment within the school curriculum. Free booklets on environment protection were distributed on July 24 among BMC teachers by the Maharashtra Pollution Control Board, as it completed 25 years of its existence in 1995. A two-day workshop was organised by the environment cell of Nirmala Niketan, Vasundhara.

The booklet catalogues various environment-related issues, seeking to make the school children aware of the world around them. Around 80 BMC education officials and teachers attended the session, which was graced by the Air Pollution Abatement Engineer, of the MPCB, K H Mehta and Director of Environment, Government of Maharashtra, V S Dhongde. The two-day workshop stressed on how BMC teachers can be involved in tree plantation and its protection, focussing on the selection of saplings and their maintainence in their immediate vicinity.

Meanwhile, about 60 teachers, mostly from English-medium schools joined in a two-day teachers' training workshop organised by World Wide Fund for Nature - India at Mahim Nature Park, today. The workshop concentrated on creating simple teaching aids to enliven the course of environment studies in schools.

``The school has been our target since 1983, as the curriculum does not pay enough attention to environment,'' said the chairman of WWF, Maharashtra unit, J F Ribeiro.

Ironically though, the new curriculum for classes I and II, flagging off from this academic session, has done away with the course completely in a play-way method. It has been informally clubbed with language and math studies. Neeta Pawar Chalke, a former education officer with WWF's Maharashtra unit, observed that while our policy speaks of compulsory theme-based outings, few schools actually venture out, and those who do mostly end up with a school picnic.

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.