Combatting Plastic Pollution: How the Sagar-Mitra Abhiyaan is Empowering Children to Make a Difference

Children from more than 100 schools in Pune have established a daily pattern that comes as naturally to them as packing their bags or doing their schoolwork. Every day, they gather little pieces of clean, dry, empty plastic from their homes, such as broken plastic ball pen casings, bottles, bottle caps, old combs, and packets, and place them in a large plastic bag that is stored just for this purpose. They give the bag of plastic goods to the school's instructors and volunteers once a month on a set day. Each youngster is deemed a "Sagar-Mitra," a Hindi term that means "Friend of the Ocean." The Academic Advisors (TAA) is an NGO that founded the Sagar-Mitra Abhiyaan initiative in 2011. The initiative began after the co-founders of TAA, Vinod Bodhankar, Susan Raj and Lalit Rathi, observed a cleaning drive organized by some groups with schoolchildren and saw that children were being exposed to hazardous materials while picking up plastic waste.  The initiative aims to provide a safe and effective way for children to collect plastic waste from their homes and contribute it for recycling or safe disposal. The program currently has over a lakh and eleven thousand students from classes 5 to 9 from schools spread across Pune city, and the goal is to cover all 780 schools in the city, or twelve lakh students, to bring about a change in the culture of the city. Children are shown presentations where they become aware of how our lifestyle practices are destroying millions of creatures on land and in the oceans for no fault of their own. The presentation is successful in highlighting plastic as a serious environmental problem. The movement is gaining momentum as 21 schools in Jalgaon, 10 in Wai (both in Maharashtra), and 5 in Rajasthan have started collections, and more are stepping forward daily.