Bhattadev University and Climate Justice Classroom

How Bhattadev University and the Mahabahu Climate Forum took a generation of students out of the lecture hall and into the grasslands of Manas, and back out again with something closer to a vocation

PAHARI BARUAH

There is a particular kind of silence that settles over a grassland at dusk, when the heat has loosened its grip and the birds begin their last exchanges before dark. It is not the silence of emptiness. It is the silence of a system working, mostly unseen, the way a town works at six in the morning.

For a group of fourth-semester undergraduates from Bhattadev University, standing at the edge of the Bhuyapara range and  Bansbari range in Manas National Park this June (20^th & 21^st June, 2026), that silence arrived as a kind of correction. They had spent a week being told, with increasing precision, that the planet’s climate systems were unraveling. Now they were standing inside a system that had been deliberately, patiently rewoven, and the distance between those two facts was the entire point of the exercise.

Climate Justice 101 Internship Programme by Mahabahu Climate Forum Begins at Bhattadev University

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The program that brought them there, Climate Justice 101, ran for sixty structured hours between June 18 and June 24, with applied work and final presentations extending to July 10. It was organized by the Mahabahu Climate Forum in partnership with Bhattadev University in Pathsala, and it set out to do something that most institutional responses to the climate crisis still struggle to attempt.

It tried to close the distance between knowing about a crisis and standing inside its consequences. The premise was almost defiantly simple. A generation that will not merely study climate change but will have to survive it cannot be adequately prepared by a curriculum confined to textbook chapters and seasonal awareness campaigns. It has to be walked through the terrain it will inherit, introduced to the people already doing the work of defending that terrain, and asked, directly, what its own responsibility will look like.

What unfolded over those weeks traces an arc that is rare in formal education anywhere, let alone within a single internship calendar. It moves from energy economics to the ethics of inequality, from drinking water infrastructure to indigenous knowledge systems, from a national park’s grasslands to a face-to-face encounter with a man who turned a barren sandbar into a forest by hand. Each stage builds on the one before it. By the end, what the students carried back to campus was not a stack of facts. It was a different relationship to the facts they already had.

The Engine Before the Crisis

Any honest education about the climate crisis has to begin somewhere uncomfortable, and Bhattadev University’s Vice Chancellor, Professor Dhanpati Deka, chose to begin at the foundation. An authority on climate and energy in his own right, Deka opened the program not with catastrophe but with infrastructure, walking students through the paradox sitting at the center of modern civilization. The same energy systems that built the conveniences of contemporary life, the electrified hospitals, the refrigerated food chains, the connected economies, are the systems now destabilizing the ecological conditions that allow civilization to function at all. It is a paradox that resists easy resolution, and Deka did not attempt to resolve it for his audience. He let it sit, because that discomfort was the doorway into everything that followed.

Deka’s involvement extended well past the opening lecture. He used the platform to describe a longer institutional ambition he has been quietly building toward, a project he calls the Green campus Project for Bhattadev University with Mahabahu Climate Forum and Climate Reality Project- India &South Asia. The idea is to convert the university’s own campus into a Green Campus and it’s affiliated colleges, a working model of the principles it teaches, a living laboratory where sustainable infrastructure and ecological practice are not subjects of instruction but features of daily operation.

 It is an ambitious bet, essentially a wager that an institution can only teach environmental responsibility convincingly if it is willing to be measured by its own example. Registrar Dr. Manjit Das extended that opening conversation into more contested terrain, walking students through the genuine policy complexity of India’s energy transition through the specific and unresolved debate over ethanol blending, a case study chosen precisely because it refuses to offer a clean villain or a tidy solution.

Bhattadev University and the Mahabahu Climate Forum in Manas National Park

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 Dr. Debajyoti Dutta, the program’s coordinator, used these early sessions to make the structural argument for the entire internship’s design, framing the case for why an interdisciplinary departure from conventional academic formats was not a stylistic preference but a practical necessity for anyone trying to understand a crisis that does not respect departmental boundaries.

From Empirical Science to a Human Reckoning

If the opening days established the physical mechanics of the crisis, the next phase of the program existed to ask a different kind of question entirely, one that chemistry and physics are simply not equipped to answer. This pivot was led by the Mahabahu Climate Forum‘s own leadership, and it marked the moment the internship’s title, Climate Justice 101, stopped being a label and became an argument.

Anjan Sarma, President of the Mahabahu Climate Forum, opened this phase by relocating the entire conversation to ground students could recognize without needing a map. He framed the Brahmaputra not as a geographic feature to be studied from a hydrology textbook but as a civilizational landscape, a river whose moods and migrations have shaped the people living along its banks for centuries, and whose accelerating instability now offers a direct, legible record of what global ecological disruption looks like when it arrives at the scale of a single watershed. Through the Brahmaputra, Sarma connected climate education to the lived reality of migration, displacement, and the slow erosion of certainty that comes from living beside a river that no longer behaves the way it once did.

It was Rituraj Phukan, Secretary and Convenor of the Mahabahu Climate Forum and the principal architect of the entire internship, who gave this shift its sharpest edge. Phukan is, by reputation and by method, someone who treats climate change less as a scientific phenomenon to be explained and more as a moral ledger to be audited, and he steered the cohort firmly away from abstraction toward the urgent social realities the data tends to obscure. His central provocation was the foundational premise of climate justice itself: those who have contributed least to environmental degradation are, with grim historical consistency, the first to suffer its consequences.

Phukan organized the entire second phase of the program around four questions that pure science has no mechanism for answering. Who benefits. Who loses. Who adapts. Who decides. Those four questions became the spine the rest of the internship was built around, the filter through which every subsequent session, on water systems, on waste, on traditional knowledge, would be examined.

On June 19th, T. C. Ranjith, the Divisional Forest Officer (DFO) of the North Kamrup Division, conducted an insightful educational session for the visiting students. He provided a detailed explanation of the critical issues affecting Manas National Park, focusing closely on the health of the Beki River’s water, the management of its vital grasslands, and the balance of its broader ecosystem. This comprehensive deliberation proved incredibly valuable for the participating interns from the Mahabahu Climate Forum, who are students at Bhattadev University, as it served as their official orientation just one day before their field trip to Manas.

The core tenet of climate justice is that those who contribute the least to environmental degradation are historically the first to suffer its consequences. Who benefits. Who loses. Who adapts. Who decides.

Entry Points Closer Than the Headlines

One of the more quietly radical decisions embedded in the program’s design was its refusal to treat climate action as something that happens primarily at international summits, in distant negotiating rooms, far removed from a student’s own daily life. Instead, the curriculum kept returning the crisis to ground level, to the systems a person in Assam actually touches every day.

Mandira Buragohain of the Assam State Disaster Management Authority brought that grounding into sharp focus, leading sessions that connected the abstract language of changing climatic conditions to the concrete realities of regional disaster preparedness and risk governance, the institutional machinery that decides, often under brutal time pressure, who gets warned, who gets evacuated, and who gets left exposed when a flood arrives ahead of schedule.

 That same logic of locating the global within the immediate carried into the sessions led by the Public Health Engineering Department, where Executive Engineer Pranab Deka, Sourabh Haloi and his team walked the cohort through the unglamorous mechanics of drinking water systems and sanitation infrastructure. The lesson embedded in those sessions was easy to miss and important to catch: climate adaptation is not only a matter of future-facing policy. It is already woven into the pipes, the treatment systems, and the community engagement protocols that determine whether a household has clean water on an ordinary Tuesday.

From there, the curriculum moved into the domestic sphere with a deliberateness that paid off. Nita Ganguly, an expert who was online from Mumbai for the program, took what could easily have been a forgettable session on household waste and turned it into something closer to a behavioral intervention, walking students through the practical mechanics of wet waste management and asking them to consider how much of the climate crisis is, in fact, decided inside kitchens rather than in parliaments.

Utpal Roy of Binbag Recycling Services (only one industry based on electronic waste) extended that logic into the electronic waste stream, introducing students to the operating principles of a circular economy through a material category most of them generate constantly and think about rarely.

Mahabahu Climate Forum Experience: Seven Days of Climate Learning

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And in a session that would echo loudly through everything that followed in Manas, Padmaza Talukdar and Kakali Das introduced Traditional Ecological Knowledge as a serious analytical framework rather than a sentimental footnote, revealing how indigenous communities across Assam have preserved sophisticated environmental intelligence across centuries, long before the vocabulary of climate science existed to validate it.

Where the Classroom Ends and the Living Laboratory Begins

If the first phase of Climate Justice 101 built an intellectual scaffolding, the second phase tore it down and rebuilt it on different terms entirely. Prepared in advance by Dr. Kaustabh Baruah, the students left Bhattadev University’s classrooms and entered Manas National Park, and the shift, by every account, was absolute. PowerPoint slides gave way to a living ecosystem that does not pause for questions and does not summarize itself in bullet points.

To understand why this particular landscape was chosen as the program’s living classroom, it helps to set aside the postcard version of Manas, the one built around striped tigers and armored rhinos, and look instead at what the park actually is. Manas sits at the foothills of the Eastern Himalayas, its northern boundary dissolving into Bhutan’s forests across a border the Manas River itself does not respect, threading west through the park before splitting into tributaries that eventually surrender to the Brahmaputra.

Spread across the districts of Chirang, Kokrajhar, Baksa, Udalguri, and Darrang, the reserve’s core zone covers nearly 39,100 hectares within a tiger reserve more than seven times that size. It is one of India’s oldest tiger reserves and a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, and it spent the late 1980s and 1990s absorbing the costs of ethnic conflict and insurgency, a period of encroachment and poaching severe enough to drive the rhinoceros to local extinction before a careful, decades-long reintroduction effort, completed in 2007, brought the species back.

Nearly half of the park’s total area is grassland, a habitat types easy to overlook and consequently easy to lose, classified as Eastern wet alluvial grassland and home to some of the most endangered species on the subcontinent. It is in this grassland, not in the forest canopy most visitors come for, that the pygmy hog survives, one of the smallest and most critically endangered wild pigs anywhere on the planet.

It is here that the hispid hare, a creature so elusive that scientists once feared it extinct, still moves through the tall cover. And it is here that the Bengal florican persists, a critically endangered bustard whose entire global population has fallen below 350 adult birds, with roughly eighty five percent of that number concentrated in India, much of it in exactly the grassland corridors the students were about to walk through.

Divided across the Bhuyanpara and Bansbari ranges, the cohort moved through a sequence of sites chosen less for scenic value than for the specific lessons embedded in each. At the Kokilabari Seed Farm, students encountered the unglamorous agricultural labor underlying habitat restoration, the work of growing and propagating native species before a single seedling ever reaches degraded ground.

At Kuribeel, the delicate architecture of grassland ecosystems came into focus as students studied the precise habitat requirements of the Bengal florican, learning that a bird’s survival can hinge on the height of grass, the timing of a controlled burn, the absence of a single disturbance at the wrong moment in its breeding cycle.

And near the Indo-Bhutan border at Mothanguri, conservation stopped being an ecological category altogether and became something closer to a geopolitical and civic fact, a place where geography, history, and the responsibility of two nations converge along a single river.

The realization that crystallized across these sites was, in the end, simple enough to fit in a single sentence, even if it took two full days inside the park to fully land. Conservation is not scenery. It is labor. Forests do not persist by default or by accident. They persist because specific people, on specific days, choose to do the unglamorous, repetitive, often invisible work of protecting them. Manas stopped being, in the students’ minds, a site for tourism and became instead what it actually is for the people who work there year-round: a living laboratory of ecological understanding, where the lesson plan is written daily by weather, by wildlife, and by the patient calculus of habitat management.

The most profound realization inside Manas was simple. Conservation is not scenery. It is labor. Forests do not survive by accident. They survive because dedicated forest officials and field practitioners protect them, day after day, with no guarantee of recognition.

One of the most engaging and memorable phases of the Climate Justice 101 Internship Programme emerged through a series of intensive online learning sessions led by Ms. Nita Ganguly, an award-winning educator whose work over the years has successfully connected environmental education with practical social transformation.

Joining the programme online from Mumbai, Ms. Ganguly interacted with the students of Bhattadev University for nearly three days, spending an average of four hours each day in highly participatory and immersive sessions. Her engagement went far beyond the conventional model of virtual lectures. Through presentations, practical exercises, interactive assignments, observation-based learning, and field-oriented activities that students could implement in their own surroundings, she transformed online teaching into an active and deeply reflective educational experience.

Ms. Ganguly is widely recognised for her contributions to environmental education and has received several National and State awards for her work as an educator. She is also the author of two colourful illustrated children’s books on environmental awareness — POLY TRAP and Hello Earth… Here We Come — which reflect her long-standing commitment to nurturing ecological consciousness from an early age.

Her journey in climate education extends well beyond classrooms. A Fulbright Scholar (2009), TEDx Speaker (2017), and National Coordinator for Waste to Wealth for The Climate Reality Project India, she has spent years working across diverse sections of society to build environmental awareness and action. Since becoming a certified Climate Reality Leader in 2008, she has consistently expanded the reach of climate communication beyond traditional audiences, engaging with defence personnel, civil society groups, educators, and even communities of waste pickers – demonstrating that environmental responsibility belongs to everyone, regardless of profession or social background.

During the internship, Ms. Ganguly introduced students to an idea that is increasingly becoming central to climate action across the world: meaningful environmental transformation begins with everyday choices and local participation. Her sessions explored household waste management, pollution, responsible consumption, environmental behaviour, and practical pathways for reducing ecological footprints. Students were encouraged not merely to listen but to act, observe, calculate, reflect, and redesign habits. Through experiential exercises and community-oriented thinking, she demonstrated how climate education becomes most powerful when it enters homes, campuses, and daily life.

Particularly memorable for many participants was her practical approach to wet waste management and her ability to convert complex environmental concerns into understandable, actionable steps for young learners. The sessions helped students realise that climate solutions are not always distant technological interventions; often they begin with informed citizens making conscious decisions within their immediate environments.

For many participants, these interactions became one of the defining educational experiences of the internship. Her warmth, intellectual clarity, practical pedagogy, and ability to inspire action left a lasting impression on the students.

Long after the formal sessions ended, her message remained clear: climate responsibility is not an additional subject to study – it is a way of thinking, living, and participating in the future.

The Forest Man, and the Limits of Institutional Imagination

The formal sustainability curriculum reached its conclusion with sessions led by Dr. Aswini Sarma on global UNESCO initiatives, situating the local work the students had just witnessed within a broader international architecture of conservation policy. But it was what came next that gave the entire internship its emotional and intellectual center of gravity. The students were addressed by Shri Jadav Payeng, globally known as the Forest Man of India, and his presence at Bhattadev University functioned less as a guest lecture than as a closing argument for everything the program had been building toward.

To understand why Payeng’s appearance carried the weight it did, it is worth recounting, briefly, what he actually did. In 1979, as a sixteen-year-old from the indigenous Mising community on Majuli, the world’s largest river island, Payeng came across hundreds of snakes that had died after floodwaters washed them onto a barren sandbar in the Brahmaputra, leaving them exposed to lethal heat with no tree cover to shelter under.

He responded by planting roughly twenty bamboo seedlings on that sandbar. He kept planting, alone, day after day, for years that became decades, eventually shifting from bamboo to a wider range of native species including banyan, neem, sal, and arjun. The forest that resulted, now known as Molai forest after his childhood nickname, spans more than 550 hectares, an area larger than New York’s Central Park, and now sustains tigers, elephants, one horned rhinoceros, and well over three hundred species of birds.

He was honored with the Padma Shri, India’s fourth highest civilian award, in 2015, the first person from his marginalized riparian community and the first from his region to receive that recognition for grassroots environmental work, a fact that resonated through northeastern India’s indigenous communities far beyond conservation circles.

What Payeng offered the students of Bhattadev University was not a lesson in policy or institutional strategy. It was a masterclass, delivered in person, in the outer limits of individual agency. He stood before them as proof that monumental ecological change does not always require a ministry, a budget line, or an international framework to begin. Sometimes it requires one person who simply refuses to stop. That message lands differently depending on who delivers it, and Payeng’s particular authority to deliver it, as a Mising man from a community more often treated as a vulnerable subject of climate change than as a source of climate solutions, gave the lesson an edge that a conventional sustainability seminar could never have produced on its own.

Claudia Laricchia

 

Claudia Laricchia, a prominent global leader and advocate, also joined the program virtually from Milan, Italy, leaving the students thoroughly enthralled by her presentation.. Laricchia wears many distinguished hats, serving as the Public Affairs Director for the Women Economic Forum Italy, the President of the SMILY Academy, and the Head of Strategic International Cooperation for the Global Forum of Indigenous Peoples’ Climate Justice Forum. Additionally, she shares her expertise as a Professor at both the European Institute of Innovation for Sustainability and the Rome Business School, while also contributing as a Correspondent for Mahabahu.

During her address, she captivated the audience by highlighting the impactful global initiatives of the SMILY Academy across various countries. She also fondly shared her personal experiences in Assam, speaking passionately about her time spent with Jadav Payeng, India’s legendary “Forest Man,” and his remarkable man-made forest.

The lesson did not remain theoretical. Inspired by the encounter, student groups worked alongside Payeng and Ananda Khataniar of Green Mission Bajali to physically plant trees on the Bhattadev University campus, an act that took the internship’s central argument and rooted it, quite literally, in soil the students would walk past every day for the rest of their academic careers.

What the Cohort Carried Back

The movement the program traced, from knowledge to observation, ultimately had to terminate somewhere, and the organizers chose to end it with a demand for synthesis rather than recall. For their final presentations on July 9, students were not asked to repeat facts back to an invited jury. They were asked to interpret them, to demonstrate that the sixty hours of instruction and the days spent walking through Manas had produced something more durable than memorized content.

What emerged from those presentations was, by most accounts, a genuine shift in register. Students spoke with a nuance about the Brahmaputra’s hydrology, about electronic waste streams, about sustainable business models, about habitat restoration, that suggested they were no longer simply reporting information but reasoning through it.

And across the cohort, a single understanding surfaced with enough consistency to function as the program’s unofficial thesis. Nature will continue without us. Human society cannot continue without nature. The two futures are not parallel tracks running independently of each other. They are the same future, viewed from two different vantage points, and the students who walked Manas’s grasslands had stood, however briefly, inside the vantage point that usually gets ignored.

Climate Justice 101 never promised to manufacture climate experts inside sixty hours, and it would be a misreading of the program to judge it by that standard. What Bhattadev University and the Mahabahu Climate Forum achieved instead was something with a longer half-life. They cultivated climate citizenship, the disposition to observe before concluding, to treat communities and field practitioners as essential partners in environmental work rather than as background detail, and to understand, with real conviction rather than secondhand certainty, that environmental stewardship is not a specialized profession reserved for someone else. It is a responsibility distributed across everyone capable of paying attention.

The Chapter That Belongs to Them

It is easy, looking back at a sixty hour program, to overstate its reach or understate its cost. Neither temptation serves the truth of what happened in Assam this June. What can be said with confidence is more modest and, in its own way, more durable. The students who passed through Climate Justice 101 will likely forget specific data points within a year or two, the precise percentage of grassland cover, the exact population figure for a critically endangered bustard. Most students forget such figures, regardless of how well they were taught.

What they are unlikely to forget is standing inside the vastness of Manas, watching a habitat get rebuilt one restoration zone at a time, and listening to a man who turned a barren sandbar into a forest tell them, in plain terms, that the work belongs to whoever is willing to begin it.

They will not forget that the next chapter of the Brahmaputra Valley’s environmental history, and by extension a meaningful share of the planet’s, now belongs to them, not as an abstraction printed on a certificate, but as a responsibility they watched other people carry, up close, for several unforgettable days. That, more than any single fact retained, may be where meaningful climate education actually begins.

Sources: Manas National Park ecological and conservation data drawn from UNESCO World Heritage documentation, World Heritage Outlook (IUCN), and Sahapedia. Biographical detail on Jadav Payeng drawn from public records including his Padma Shri citation (2015), the Equator Initiative profile of Molaikathoni and contemporaneous reporting on the Molai forest, Majuli ; and Mahabahu.com.

25-06-2026

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