Mandated But Missing: Why India’s Environmental Education Falters at the Ground Level

From Constitutional Mandate to the Classroom

Every child in India today learns something about the environment in school – but this was not always the case, as the journey from a constitutional mandate to what can be achieved in the classroom has evolved over the years.

In 1991, the Supreme Court of India swiftly responded to a PIL filed by the renowned environmental lawyer MC Mehta which advocated for several measures for environmental awareness among the general population of the country – including separate and special measures for children. Granting the appeal, the judgment invoked the amendment to the Fundamental Duties [article 51A(g)] which requires every citizen to protect and improve the natural environment including forests, lakes, rivers and wild life, and to have compassion for living creatures. This, read with Articles 21 (Right to Life) and 48A (Protection and Improvement of Environment and Safeguarding of Forests), the court concluded that environmental awareness had to become an integral part of formal education.

The Supreme Court mandated the University Grants Commission and the Central Government to look after the inclusion of this subject in institutions under their purview, and further directed all states to incorporate environmental education to be made a compulsory graded component in schools.

Unfortunately, the landmark judgment did not lead to immediate changes, as one familiar with India’s policy implementation via judicial mandates would already expect. Mr. Mehta reappealed to the Supreme Court in 2003, which led to the Court once again ordering all the relevant agencies to review and implement the old order for the academic year 2004-05. The failure to comply would cause the Court to levy hefty fines on the implementing agencies.

At this point, it is worth noting that each administrative layer added for the change to reach the child adds its own capacity constraints, delays, local priorities, diluting the original vision.

Operationalising the Mandate

The National Policy on Education (1986, modified 1992) had given NCERT a policy basis for environmental education by declaring the “Protection of the Environment” as a common core value that should run throughout education.

Layering this pedagogical approach over MC Mehta, NCERT, via its appointed body of experts created the National Curriculum Framework (NCF) 2005. According to this framework, environment studies would be a graded component – but not as a standalone subject. Knowledge about the environment and its protection would run through a myriad of topics across textbooks that children were already formally studying.The 2005 framework did not mistake textbooks as the ultimate authority in EE. It emphasises the role of children stepping out and observing their own surroundings and learning from it.

Emerging research, feedback, and advocacy prompted the Government to recognise that textbook learning alone is not enough to create environmentally aware citizens. Alongside the curriculum reforms, the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC), had also developed the National Green Corps (NGC) which established Eco-clubs in schools across the country.

The UN declared 2005–2014 the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (DESD). India gradually started adopting this language and started incorporating the language of sustainability, climate change, social justice and more in its curricula.

However, as learning became everyone’s responsibility, it also became no one's priority. The burden of compliance largely fell on states governments, individual institutions, and individual teachers. These constraints affected the execution of the vision at the ground-level, reducing EVS to another classroom subject that tested rote-learning. As a consequence, large-scale behavioural impact due to the curriculum change remained severely limited across the nation.

Dedicated Monetary Support for EE

Can a grant really produce pedagogical confidence to run such clubs confidently? Or do they merely fulfil the costs for the creation of a compost pit or a trip to the nearby forest?

While Eco-Clubs were primarily established as an MoEFCC initiative under the National Green Corps -- funded via State Nodal Agencies -- a major institutional shift occurred in 2018 with the launch of Samagra Shiksha Abhiyan under the Ministry of Education.

Samagra Shiksha Abhiyan sought to merge existing centrally sponsored schemes for elementary, secondary, and teacher education. The Abhiyaan came with earmarked annual grants specifically for environmental and co-curricular activities, with dedicated financial assistance for Youth and Eco Clubs.

Despite this, this did not take away from the existing classroom worries – examination pressure, entrance tests, and more. The modest funding was often not enough to rehaul and sustain environmental education in schools. Furthermore, the pace of learning about the environment was barely keeping up with the rate at which environmental degradation was happening in real time.

While earmarking funds can be seen as a step in the right direction, it also showed that confusing outputs with outcomes leads to losing sight of and mismeasurement of what is to be tracked.

A National Education Policy That Adapted

The National Education Policy (2020) focuses on steering EE curricula across the country towards the most immediate and pressing demands. It made sustainability a core learning goal across education levels country-wide. It once again emphasised on learning that's local, hands-on, and community-connected. It asks “What should environmental education prepare students for in the 21st century?” and includes topics such as sustainability, climate literacy, sustainable development goals in line with the conversation surrounding educational literacy beyond India.

The new framework emphasises competencies, values, attitudes, and environmental stewardship – which remain hard to measure among students unlike hard factual knowledge. This, too, points to why translating policy into practice is so difficult: it is one thing to mandate that a value be taught, and quite another to build the assessment and support systems that tell a school whether it is actually being learned.

However, since the states are not compelled to execute the NEP 2020, many states have exercised their autonomy and have not made changes to their curricula yet.

Following the alignment with NEP 2020 and updated climate goals, the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEF&CC) also revamped its own flagship scheme. The traditional Environment Education, Awareness and Training (EEAT) scheme was transitioned into EEARSD (Environment Education, Awareness, Research and Skill Development).

The goals behind the initiative changed from passive, campaign-style sensitisation toward action-oriented capacity building that could pave the way for green careers by explicitly embedding green vocational training (like through the Green Skill Development Programme) into the national mandate. While the scheme’s mandate was expanded, its budget remains a tiny fraction of the Ministry's overall funding. Budget estimates typically hover around ₹85 to ₹104 crore annually – a very small allocation when divided across India's hundreds of thousands of schools and colleges. At ₹5,000 annually per Eco-Club, a participating school receives less than ₹420 a month to execute its environmental activities. Furthermore, the number of schools eligible for the grant per district is capped at 500 schools per district and 100 colleges per state. For comparison, the average number of schools per district in India is approximately 1,800 to 1,850.

Despite this, out of the ₹87.4 crore allotted to EEARSD in FY 2024-25, only about ₹65 crore was spent, highlighting bureaucratic delays and lack of awareness among beneficiary institutions.

While these remain the major curricula-linked milestones in the history of environmental education in independent India, it is also worth noting that several other adjacent behavioural missions have targeted schools as hubs of change. This includes Swacch Bharat Mission (2014) and Mission Lifestyle for Environment (2022), where schools were identified as important institutions for fostering environmentally responsible behaviour by encouraging practices such as waste reduction, resource conservation, and sustainable consumption. These programmes reflect a different approach to learning about the environment – one where schools act as centres of community engagement, from where sustainable practices can extend beyond students and into households and local communities.

Why don’t good policy documents translate to on-ground realities?

Interventions have been essential in establishing that children must learn about the environment. But, they also reveal the limits of a policy-led approach: a subject can be mandated, funded, and included in textbooks without necessarily helping children build a meaningful relationship with the natural world. A well-written well-intentioned policy alone cannot close the gap between the desired state and reality on its own.

In summary, the reality is burdened by practical challenges. Behavioural change is hard to sustain where infrastructural and governance gaps exist, while passing a vision through multiple levels of administration and bureaucracy dilutes its effects. With a large number of departments looking into the matter, the danger of it becoming nobody’s priority hangs overhead. Measuring long-term habit changes rather than one-off activity participation is also often unfeasible given the limited capacity of government schools, and expecting overburdened teachers to independently organise outdoor field learning is unrealistic.

Resolving the last-mile delivery problem could channel the knowledge and passion of individual educators and organisations into the formal school system in a sustained and systemic manner. Integrating naturalists, conservationists, and community experts into regular lesson plans can widen the horizons and depth of learning for students, while introducing them to the serious, professional work that goes on in the domain. This could further encourage more children to take over the baton of environmental conservation and education and become future educators.

At YouCAN, we closely understand how children learn about the environment. With a mission to enable local educators and teachers to bridge the gap between policy mandates and classroom reality, we nurture a community-led network of Earth Educators who can guide children to observe, connect with, and protect their immediate ecosystems.

Young mentors, from outside of the formal classroom system, are often free from the burdens that full-time teachers carry, which allows them to bring fresh ideas, perspectives, and learning methods to execution with young minds. We believe that empowering local leaders with a passion for environmental education as genuine parts of how the subject is delivered could be a way to help address the capacity and training gaps that have limited previous interventions.

In the next part of this series, we will take a closer look at how different states have absorbed the spirit of the directions and mandates coming from higher authorities, culminating in localised adaptations of the environmental education policies.