The classroom is buzzing with ideas. It’s an entrepreneurship camp, and students are grouped around desks, thinking like founders for the first time.

The brief is simple but daunting: identify a real-world problem and build a business idea around it.

Among them are four teenagers from Gurukul The School in Ghaziabad. They listen, debate, discard ideas, and start again. As mentors move around the room, urging students to think beyond the obvious, one question begins to stand out: what problem do we see every day, and why hasn’t it been addressed yet?

There’s no business plan yet. No startup name. No clear solution. Just a growing instinct that sustainability — and the role plastic plays in their daily lives — deserves closer attention.

Two years later, that instinct would become ‘Pahal’ — a student-led sustainability movement and startup founded by four teenagers. Their goal: to prove that environmental responsibility doesn’t need a degree, a funding round, or permission.

Sometimes, it simply needs someone to notice and begin.

“We started Pahal as a movement because, in the beginning, we were still discovering how to build a business. So we began by replacing plastic within our school campus,” says 17-year-old Akshita Joshi, CMO of Pahal, to The Better India.

For Akshita and her friends — Simran Arora (CEO)(17), Maanya Tyagi (CFO)(16), and Arshya Singh (COO)(16) — that early instinct from the camp began taking shape in 2023. What started as a classroom exercise soon spilled into conversations beyond it.

Somewhere between sessions and a lunch-break conversation, the first seed of Pahal was planted. When the group chose to explore sustainability, a simple observation stood out: the sheer frequency of plastic bags, from grocery runs to home deliveries.

“Plastic bags are almost everywhere, from grocery shopping to home deliveries. Starting with cotton tote bags felt like a simple, practical place to begin, and our mentor pushed us to expand the idea further,” adds Akshita.

The name Pahal came naturally — a Hindi word that means the first step. It reflected both their intent and their uncertainty. None of them fully knew how to run a business yet. But they knew they wanted to start somewhere.

Before selling even a single bag, Pahal took its first real step within familiar walls — their own school campus.

What strengthened their resolve was........

© The Better India