Ever wondered what happens to truck containers once they wear out?
Well, one woman is giving them a new lease on life by transforming them into colourful, air-conditioned classrooms running on solar power!
Co-founder and CEO of Safeducate, a training, skilling and consulting firm, Divya Jain launched the initiative in 2015. Within three years, these container classrooms have successfully trained over 20,000 students from Tier-3 cities of rural India!
Speaking to India Today Education, Divya says, “The container school programme is an initiative to reach the masses where government reach is limited. The innovative concept will greatly bring down the cost and effort involved in developing infrastructure to meet the skilling needs of people.”
Her initiative has been widely appreciated by the National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC) and the Ministry of Rural Development (MORD).
How do these container schools function?
Once the large containers are scrapped, the team sources them from shipyards and recycles them based on their requirements, making classrooms, laboratories, libraries, restrooms, dormitories, simulation labs, office spaces, receptions etc.
The advantage of these container schools is they are 100% reusable and portable.
The skill development programmes that Safeducate conducts in these containers targets youth as well as children who do not have access to amenities or schools in their localities.
The concept can be of great help to the government to conduct training programmes in the remotest parts of the country, where construction of buildings for the purpose is either not financially feasible or locationally viable.
And since these are portable, they can be disassembled after a project, moved to another location for a different project, and reassembled.
What makes the container schools even more unique is that apart from being portable and cheap to build, they can be equipped to run on solar energy through the installation of panels.