Indian Revenue Service officer Rohit Mehra, who is also known as the Green Man of India, is on a mission to make this world a greener and healthier place to live in. Despite pursuing a career in civil service, Mr. Mehra goes out of his way to also pursue his passion of promoting greenery and educating the masses about its benefits and how they can also contribute to making planet earth green.

For the past four-five years, Mr. Mehra along with his wife Geetanjali Mehra has been educating school children about environment and the ecosystem under the programme, Panchtatva. This is not an ordinary education class as it focuses on explaining the whole ecosystem to the children and then asks them to practically get involved in its betterment.

And, now, the officer has made a value addition to this programme by starting a comprehensive initiative of inviting school children for forest walks. The forests, where the children are invited, are man-made and have been developed by the officer himself. He has been creating forests for over decades and till now, he has successfully developed around 270 man-made forests all across the country.

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PANCHTATVA PROGRAMME

Explaining how a human body is related to the environment, Mr. Rohit Mehra said, “We as human beings are made up of five elements – air, fire, water, space and earth. This is same for the planet as well. Through Panchtatva programme, we reach out to the students of various schools across the country and clear their fundamentals of environment in a very basic way. We explain to them how the planet earth corelates with the humans and how humans are the extension of the planet earth.”

Under this programme, Mr. Mehra with his team visit the schools to give lectures on the Panchtatva to make students more environmentally conscious. This lecture is taken as an extra learning apart from the regular subjects they study in school. According to Mr. Mehra, the simple theory of how the ecosystem works helps students in various subjects like Biology, EVS, Geography, etc., and also gives them a sense of living a sustainable life.

PRACTICAL WORK

Apart from the theoretical part, the students also engage in practical activities, where they implement the learnings they got from the IRS officer. Preparation of seed balls, making a forest in school, and adopting five green habits are some practical activities students are engaged in after the lecture.

The five green habits include – not wasting electricity, writing on both sides of a paper, not wasting water – every day habits that can be incorporated in the children’s lives. Through this, the officer is trying to create a more environment-friendly lifestyle for the kids. Mr. Mehra said, “In these past four-five years, we have taught more that 2.5 lakh students and industry people about the Panchtatva and are in the process of building a bigger team. We play on the concept of learning and then training. We further ask the students we train to train other students and people.”

FOREST WALKS

Apart from the Panchtatva programme, which has spread over states like Chhattisgarh, Jammu, Punjab, Delhi etc., Mr. Mehra has started a comprehensive project of inviting school children to places where he has created a man-made forest. He said, “By visiting the forest, students get a sense of trees, soil, vegetables, fruits and how a culture is formed in these forests. Once a child visits these forest practically, we believe that they become environment conscious and would take steps for its betterment in future.”

Under this project, around four to five thousand students in Punjab visited forests and had amazing experiences.