India does not need to discover sustainability as an entirely new idea; it needs to recover the relationships, habits and forms of knowledge that once made sustainable living part of everyday life, Prof (Dr) Govind Singh said in his keynote address at the 5th Yuva Sustainability Conference, held online on 12 August 2026 to mark International Youth Day 2026. The conference, themed ‘Mainstreaming Sustainability in the Education Ecosystem’, was organised by Voices of Bharat: Yuva for Sustainability, an initiative of Sustainability Karma.
Singh, Media Advisor to the Chief Minister of Uttarakhand, organised his remarks around two linked questions: what sustainability means and what education is meant to do. His central argument was that the environmental crisis cannot be separated from the model of development that produced it, and education cannot solve that crisis if it continues to reproduce the same narrow assumptions about progress, knowledge and human well-being.
For generations, he said, communities conserved not only land and agriculture but also language, customs and ways of living. Sustainability was not presented as a separate policy objective because it was woven into how people farmed, reused materials, shared resources and understood their place within a community. The instruction to ‘focus on sustainability’ became necessary only after modern civilisation weakened many of those relationships.
“If modern development had not happened, the problem of sustainability would not have arisen,” Singh said. The statement was not an argument against every form of modern knowledge. It was a challenge to a development model that measures progress through production and consumption while treating environmental damage, public health and the erosion of community life as secondary costs.
Sustainability was once a lived practice
Singh’s examples came from rural and agricultural life. Practices such as repairing, reusing and recycling were embedded in ordinary households long before circularity became a formal economic concept. Farming, local language and patterns of cooperation formed a connected social system. When one element was weakened, the loss was not only cultural; it also reduced a community’s capacity to conserve resources and respond collectively to change.
The shift towards chemically intensive agriculture illustrated the cost of treating production as the only objective. Singh referred to the heavy use of pesticides and chemical inputs in Punjab and the serious health concerns associated with them. The example placed sustainability within an immediate human frame: soil, food, water and health cannot be separated, and a method that raises output while damaging these foundations cannot be described as holistic development.
This is why sustainability education must do more than supply environmental facts. It must help learners examine how development choices are made, who bears their costs and which inherited practices still contain useful knowledge. A student may understand pollution or climate change in theory yet remain unable to question the systems of consumption, production and social prestige that intensify them.
Singh welcomed the direction of India’s new education policy insofar as it recognises holistic learning and gives greater space to Indian knowledge traditions. But policy language alone cannot transform classrooms. The deeper task is to change the relationship between learner, teacher, knowledge and the world outside the school – a task for which he turned to several Indian educational thinkers and institutions.
Four education models worth revisiting
Singh’s address did not present a formal comparison of educational philosophies. His references nevertheless point to four distinct models that expand what sustainability education can mean. Each moves beyond the idea that education is the transfer of information from an authority to a passive student. Together, they emphasise nature, integral development, self-knowledge, character and the teacher’s role as a guide.
Rabindranath Tagore’s Santiniketan: Learning in and with nature
Singh recalled the Santiniketan model associated with Rabindranath Tagore, where classes were held in the open, often beneath trees, and learning was not confined by the physical or intellectual walls of a conventional classroom. Students encountered nature as part of the learning environment itself. Discussion, observation and cultural exchange could sit alongside formal study, allowing inherited Indian knowledge and modern or Western ideas to be examined together rather than placed in separate compartments.
For sustainability education, the significance of this model is practical. Nature is not reduced to a chapter in a textbook; it becomes the setting in which curiosity and responsibility develop. Open-air learning can make seasons, biodiversity, water, soil and local livelihoods visible. Its larger principle can also guide urban institutions: campuses can create spaces where students observe ecological relationships, discuss competing ideas and connect knowledge with the places in which they live.
Sri Aurobindo: Integral education of the whole person
Singh also invoked Sri Aurobindo’s educational vision. Its relevance lies in the idea that education should develop the whole person rather than train only the intellect. Physical development, emotional and social capacities, the mind and the learner’s deeper sense of purpose are treated as connected. Education therefore becomes a process of unfolding human potential, not simply preparing a student to compete for marks or employment.
This integral approach expands sustainability beyond technical efficiency. Environmental responsibility depends on judgement, restraint, empathy and the ability to understand long-term consequences. A learner may possess scientific knowledge but still make destructive choices if education has not cultivated self-awareness or ethical purpose. In Singh’s argument, holistic education is valuable precisely because it joins knowledge with the formation of the person who will use it.
J. Krishnamurti: The teacher as guide, not authority
The clearest change in classroom relationships came through Singh’s reference to J. Krishnamurti. Knowledge should not simply be poured down upon a child from above, he said while explaining the idea. The teacher is not the unquestionable owner of knowledge. ‘You are only a guide,’ Singh said, summarising a model in which learners are encouraged to observe, inquire and understand rather than merely obey.
This has direct implications for sustainability. Students need space to question familiar definitions of development, examine their own consumption and recognise how fear, competition and social pressure influence behaviour. A guide can introduce evidence and discipline without closing inquiry. Such a classroom does not ask students to memorise the correct environmental position; it helps them develop the attention and independence required to make responsible decisions in changing circumstances.
Swami Vivekananda: Character, strength and service
Singh’s reference to Swami Vivekananda brings a fourth dimension: education as the development of character, confidence, self-reliance and a commitment to service. In this tradition, information has value only when it strengthens a person’s capacity to act. Education should enable young people to recognise their own abilities and use them in relation to society, rather than remain dependent on external instruction or approval.
The sustainability connection is ethical agency. Climate change, pollution and resource depletion cannot be addressed by awareness alone; they require people willing to accept responsibility, cooperate and persist when action is inconvenient. Character-based education gives sustainability a social purpose. It asks not only what a student knows, but what kind of person that student is becoming and how that growth serves others.
Teacher training is the missing bridge
These models cannot be revived by adding their names to a syllabus. Singh said schools inspired by major Indian thinkers do exist, but the educational system has made too little effort to bring the substance of their ideas into teacher preparation and daily classroom practice. Teachers cannot facilitate inquiry, integral development or nature-based learning if their own training has prepared them only to deliver content and complete a prescribed course.
Echoing an earlier concern raised during the conference, Singh described teacher training as both limited and insufficiently serious. ‘There is a great need for honest training,’ he said. That training must help educators understand the philosophical purpose of education, create learning without unnecessary pressure and connect lessons with lived social and environmental realities.
The teacher’s role therefore becomes more demanding, not less. A guide must listen, diagnose the learner’s needs, frame questions, create experiences and know when to step back. Teachers also need the freedom and institutional support to work across subjects. Without that preparation, holistic education risks becoming another attractive phrase that leaves the examination-centred classroom unchanged.
Returning to roots without rejecting the present
Singh argued that modern development has made society increasingly dependent on a single model of progress and has weakened cooperative forms of rural and community life. Returning to India’s roots, in his framing, means removing the assumption that older knowledge is automatically backward and examining what was lost when local systems of production, culture and mutual support were displaced.
That return need not become nostalgia or isolation. The Santiniketan example itself suggests dialogue between traditional, modern and Western ideas. The objective is not to freeze education in the past but to recover principles that remain useful: proximity to nature, respect for context, self-knowledge, restraint, cooperation and learning that develops the whole human being.
For institutions, this means evaluating education by more than examination results, credentials or employability. A sustainability-oriented system would also ask whether learners can relate knowledge to life, recognise the consequences of development choices, work with others and act without waiting for compulsion. It would treat culture and ecology as living sources of understanding rather than decorative additions to a modern curriculum.
Singh concluded that the sustainability crisis now confronting the world will not be resolved through technology or policy alone. Education has to help society look again at its foundations and rebuild the capacities that unsustainable development has eroded. By combining useful modern knowledge with India’s holistic educational traditions, he suggested, institutions can prepare young people not merely to participate in the future but to make that future liveable.