Kerala Students Guardians of Greenery

Students are the future. They are tomorrow’s leaders who will be taking all the important decisions regarding social issues, economy, politics, law and order. A good foundation today will ensure great leaders in the future. Even today students have a big role to play in the society. They are held in high esteem by the society. A lot of good things are expected of us. unfortunately for most of the part we are unable to live up to the expectation. We fall short of fulfilling our duties as a student as well as a responsible citizen.

Students are the youthful population of the society. Their energy and enthusiasm is a great asset to the society. This youthful energy if channeled properly can bring positive changes in the society student include everyone from kinder garden kids to research scholars. Kindergarten and primary student cannot take much active participation in various social causes but they can and should be made a War^ of it. As students we have a lot of leisure time in our hands. We can use our time fruitfully by involving ourselves in important social issues and actively Taking part in it. An important issue which is facing our society today is the rapid degradation of our environment. The degradation of the environment is a direct consequence of man’s thoughtless actions.

In the name of development, we remove trees and vegetation, change how we use land, and keep expanding paved areas. All these not only affect the soil ecology, but also the water balance. Increased urbanization also requires more water to feed the city's population and industry, often requiring deeper and deeper wells to be drilled or water to be moved from even more distant locations.

The students of Meenchanda Ramakrishna Mission Higher Secondary School in Kozhikode, Kerala guarded 300 trees facing the axe for a development project and refused to buckle down to the pressure from the corporation.

The school children had planted over 300 saplings, six years ago, along both sides of the road at the Karaparamba-Kunduparamba bypass, and would spend most of their free time watering and caring for these trees, just like a friend.

So, they were rightfully enraged when they came across the order to cut all the trees to construct a footpath and drainage under bypass extension project from the Public Works Department (PWD).

According to the local Malayalam daily The students’ green crusade, fortunately, bore fruit when Thottathil Raveendran, the Mayor of Kozhikode, formally visited the area for inspection and agreed to revise the order.

The Mayor concluded that all the trees need not be chopped down and passed an order stating that only those trees that were dry, decaying or posed a threat to the general public would be cut. And thus, instead of 300 trees, only five trees which fell under the criteria mentioned above were cut down.

The children staged a protest under their environmental organization ‘Prithvi Root,’  to save the trees that they had nurtured all these years.