School in Assam allows children to pay for lessons with plastic waste Most students at Akshar School are former child laborers NEW DELHI: Gyandeep Rongsal never imagined that one day he could leave the stone quarry he was working at and go to school, write rap songs and learn to play the guitar. It was all unfathomable for him until 2016, when a school in the village of Pamohi, in India’s northeastern state of Assam, offered lessons to out-of-school children in exchange for plastic waste. Like most of the school’s 110 students, Rongsal is a former child laborer whose life has been transformed by the Akshar School, on the outskirts of Assam’s Guwahati city. “My parents were reluctant initially, but they agreed, and I got the experience of studying in a school,” Rongsal told Arab News At the stone quarry, Rongsal used to earn $7 a day to help sustain his family. At the school, he receives vocational training, which allows him to work while also continuing his education. “For students like me, this school is very transformative. Four years ago, I could not imagine that I would one day be able to speak in English or play the guitar and football. Today, I see a new world opening for me,” the 17-year-old said. The school was established in 2016 to help children out of poverty while also addressing environmental issues. “It’s a new kind of school, where we teach poor children how to escape poverty,” the school’s founder, Mazin Mukhtar, told Arab News. Since parents were unable to afford school fees, Mukhtar thought they could pay for lessons with plastic waste instead. “We started a policy called ‘plastic school fee,’ whereby we started asking parents to send plastic as fees for school,” said Mukhtar, an American of Sudanese origin. “The policy was a hit, and it helped us recycle plastic waste and contribute to a healthier ecosystem.” At the school, teenage pupils can still earn a living by helping turn waste into ecobricks. “These ecobricks are used for small construction projects around the school,” Mukhtar said. “The idea is to combine employment with learning so that we can not only prevent dropouts but also get dropouts from other schools to come to our school.” Older students can also earn between $60 and $70 a week by teaching their juniors. The project, which is supported with both individual and corporate donations, proved highly successful, and over a hundred children are on a waiting list to join. Mukhtar said that it may not be possible at the moment to admit them all, though. “We have limited capacity, and we are not able to take in many more students.” The school has, however, recently signed an agreement with the Assam administration to introduce its model to five government schools. Parmita Sarma is one of the pillars of the project. She shares the same goal with Mukhtar — to do “something different to lift people out of poverty.” “If you want to lift people out of poverty, you cannot focus on only one aspect of the problem. We wanted to have a holistic approach in school, where we take care of the needs of both the children and parents so that we can help them escape poverty,” Sarma told Arab News. “Our plan is to educate them and give them vocational training so that they can acquire skills and work as professionals when they are 18 years old.” “There have been no dropouts in the last two years,” Mukhtar said. “Not only that. Awareness about plastic and the environment has considerably reduced the practice of burning plastic in the area, and it has reduced pollution in the region.”