Banyan Earth School
WA 19, Sector 135, Noida, Uttar Pradesh 201304, India
http://www.banyanearthschool.org/
Nestled at the edge of Bangalore’s rapidly receding green belt, Banyan Earth School occupies a four-acre campus threaded by eight magnificent ficus trees whose aerial roots have become natural play structures for barefoot children. Established in 2009 by environmental architects Anil and Vidya Murthy, the school grew out of a weekend forest camp that refused to close its gates when the founders saw how quickly concrete replaced canopy in the surrounding landscape. Today, 180 children ages 3-14—many first-generation from farming families downslope—study under a curriculum that is 50 % Karnataka state syllabus and 50 % regenerative learning labs rooted in soil ecology.
Weekdays begin at 7:30 with a barefoot silent circle on dew-wet granite; the circle marks a threshold between the village road and the campus where the temperature perceptively drops three degrees under the banyan roof. Acoustic learning follows—flute birdsongs, rainfall recordings, and children’s own multilingual poetry are uploaded to the “soundshed archive,” a weather-proof open-source server powered by an orb of 144 photovoltaic shingles that double as art. Core academics are taught in Kannada, Hindi, and English, but every concept ends the week transposed into one of four eco-forms: seed syllables (literacy), mud maps (geometry), mycelium circuits (science), and dye palettes (art). An interdisciplinary theme—water, soil, human energy, forest economics—cycles through six weeks, building toward village-wide pop-up exhibitions rather than examinations.
Afternoons dissolve into work streams: Grey-water orchards, bamboo tuk-tuk prototypes, or “Neighbourhood 500” surveys in which students audit carbon and biodiversity footprints of every household within a 500-meter radius. A three-member stewardship council comprised of one teacher, one student, and one elder farmer meets every full-moon night to veto any campus plan that moves faster than the slowest root. Fridays are earmarked for “Deep Time Fridays”: students replicate geological events in sandboxes, bake clay tablets with contemporary events, and bury them together for future cohorts to excavate. The idea is borrowed from Friends of the Pleistocene but localized into Dakkani metaphors of cyclical decay and renewal.
The physical campus is built largely from three materials—earth (compressed-stabilized blocks mixed with lime and jaggery), reclaimed teak, and glass borrowed from de-roofed high-rise projects. Only two permanent structures rise more than one story; the rest are semi-permeable halls that retract into the treescape during monsoon. Rainwater is stored in three levels: rooftop drums for hand-washing, mid-canopy ferro-cement tanks filtered by vetiver, and an underground cistern shaped like the root system of the mother banyan. No visitor faculty can stay longer than three days without swapping a skill—recent residencies include an Indonesian batik artisan, a Bangalore neuroscientist mapping neural plasticity in leaf-cutter ants, and a nomadic puppeteer reviving the Karaga oral cycle.
Assessment is narrative and participatory. Parents log into an open journal where mentors post “field glyphs”: short poetic observations of what each child noticed, carried, and invented. Annual capstones are public symposia staged in Kannada, Hindi, and English; in 2023 five alumni presented their bamboo-carbon home research at COP28’s youth pavilion. Fees operate on a sliding-scale paddock-return model: households contribute either the urban equivalent tuition, 15 % of post-harvest crop revenue, or 80 documented hours of regenerative labour on neighbouring commons.
Recent recognition includes a UNESCO-Japan ESD prize shortlist (2021) and the city’s first native dung beetle comeback recorded on campus (2022). Next year the school will phase out propane entirely, in favour of bio-gas from the student-fed Gaushala and portable “algae lungs” cultivated in rooftop poly-tunnels. The guiding motto, hand-carved into the threshold stone, reads simply: “Be the branch that roots before it rises.”
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- Published: July 30, 2025
