The Green Army program is our flagship CSR initiative that aims to educate school children on the aspects of sustainable lifestyle and create one million caring citizens. Introduced in 2014 on children's day, the program strives to inculcate sustainable habits into the day-to-day lives of children and build change agents who spread the message of sustainability. Through small habits and recording of the same in form of report cards, children inspire adults as well to demonstrate and practise green living. We have had tremondous interest from schools to conduct this program. We have extended this program to cover green schools program in FY 20 and to include parents in a green army family workshop in FY 21. We celebrated its sixth anniversary in 2020-21. An exclusive session was conducted for the employees of Mahindra Lifespaces. 56 people participated in the session, resulting in ~84 volunteering hours.
Overall, we achieved a significant milestone of reaching over 434 schools, 74,000 kids and 2,91,000 citizens in Mumbai Metropolitan Region, Pune, Nagpur, Chennai, Delhi, Ahmedabad, Bengaluru.
In 2019-20, in addition to the green army engagement, we also kick-started the Mahindra Green School program in 2 schools to reach out to all age groups and drive positive change within the school premises. Aligned to the SDGs, this program moves beyond merely sensitising students and encourages them to implement solutions to optimise resource use and make the school green. In such schools, we mobilise students from Class IV and above to constitute a green army committee. This committee will review the environmental performance of the school on the ten defined areas including biodiversity, energy, waste, water, transport, etc. Based on the review, the committee will develop and implement an action plan. It is envisaged to benchmark and rank different schools participating in this program and award the Best Green School Award.