On a warm morning in Karnataka’s Bilapura village, students gather around composting units, notebooks open, watching food waste turn back into soil. This lesson has little to do with textbooks or theory. It begins with a problem the village has been dealing with for years.

As new housing came up and consumption patterns changed, waste in Bilapura Panchayat began to grow faster than local systems could manage. Garbage piled up on open land. Some of it slipped into nearby lakes. Over time, the impact became impossible to ignore. Residents lived with the smell and smoke. Animals fed along roadsides. And the landscape slowly carried the burden.

This learning space exists because of that reality.

There are no blackboards here and no exams. What happens around these composting units is shaped by the everyday challenges the village’s panchayat faces. It is from here that Azim Premji University enters the story, not as an observer, but as a neighbour.

At the university, sustainability guides daily practice, from how water is conserved to how waste is handled on campus. That everyday discipline shaped how the institution chose to work with the community just beyond its gates.

“We cannot keep preaching sustainability without practising it,” says Professor Anjor Bhaskar, faculty member and convener of the university’s sustainability committee. “If we are teaching young people about building a just, humane and equitable society, sustainability has to be at the core of that vision.”

Founded under the Azim Premji Foundation, the university was built with a clear mission: to contribute meaningfully to a society worth living in. Sustainability principles shaped the campus infrastructure early on. An extensive rainwater harvesting system collects rain from rooftops and open land and channels it into a man-made lake. Today, the campus can store nearly two crore litres of rainwater.

Yet for Anjor, something still felt incomplete.

“We didn’t want to be an elite institution that exists like an island, teaching about development and sustainability while ignoring what’s happening just outside our gates,” he says. “That wouldn’t be doing justice to our role as an educational institution.”

That unresolved question pushed the university to look outward.

Bilapura Panchayat, with a population of around 12,000 people, lies on the outskirts of Bengaluru, shaped by both rural life and rapid urban expansion. This in-between identity brings its own pressures, especially when it comes to managing everyday services like waste.

“Earlier, we simply didn’t have enough human or material resources to manage waste properly,” says Manjunath, executive officer of Anekal Taluk, under which Bilapura Panchayat falls.

“This area is neither fully rural nor fully urban. That mix creates unique........

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