Govt school in Kot Khalsa bags Wipro Earthian Award-2024

The Government Senior Secondary Smart School, Kot Khalsa, Amritsar, has been shortlisted for the 2024 National Wipro Earthian Award. The 2024 Wipro Earthian winners represent a diverse group of schools from 15 states, working on different themes of the programme, namely, waste, water and biodiversity. The winning teams include both government and private schools, with a total of 23 schools making it to the national final list. GSSS, Kot Khalsa, team will be receiving the award in an event to be held in February next year in Bengaluru.

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Palvinder Kaur, a science teacher at Government Senior Secondary School, Kot Khalsa, led the project that won a place in the national list of winners. She along with her five students of Class 6 had been working on the theme of solid waste management around the year, planning and implementing collection, segregation and reuse of wet, dry and plastic waste.

“This project was assigned to us by Punjab State Council for Science and Technology in collaboration with Wipro. We worked on segregation and disposal of five types of waste i.e., dry, wet, medical, e-waste and plastic waste. We set up a plastic bank at school and also sent the plastic and e-waste to recycling unit of the MC at Chheharta. The students were mentored on decomposing wet waste and creating usable items from paper waste,” shared Palvinder Kaur. She and her team of students also created pen holders, dustbins from recycled plastic waste and made insect repellent paper from waste paper.

“We mixed neem pulp and paper pulp, set them to create insect repellent paper and experimented with its viability over a period of several weeks. Finally, we documented and submitted our project report on these activities for the Wipro Earthian Award and we are excited to be chosen among the national winners this year,” said Palvinder. Their project beat 1,550 other entries submitted nationally to become the winner from Punjab. The team will receive a cash prize of Rs 50,000 along with the award.

Palvinder Kaur has been running solid liquid resource management projects, creating pesticides, insecticides and bio-fuels from kitchen waste, school waste and other waste products for the last four years. Last year, she managed to create bioplastic using potato peels and kitchen waste from waste rice cooked in mid-day meal in schools, in an effort to minimise wastage in schools.