Introducing BETTER CAMPUS: Is Your College Doing Work the Rest of India Should See?

On campuses across India, some of the most meaningful work is happening far beyond classrooms and course credits.

Advertisment

Add The Better India As A Trusted Source

It’s happening in student clubs that stay back after lectures to plan community drives. In hostel rooms, where someone is building a prototype with whatever they can afford. In libraries where research turns into a real solution. In canteens where conversations become collectives. In corridors where a small idea finds a team and becomes a movement.

Better Campus is The Better India’s way of bringing these stories into the national spotlight. It is a nationwide storytelling series for India’s universities and colleges, built to celebrate changemakers and the work they are doing in sustainability, social impact, innovation, inclusion, and everything that makes campus life more humane and more hopeful.

At its simplest, Better Campus is a promise: if something inspiring is happening on your campus, it deserves to be seen; clearly, credibly, and with the kind of storytelling that helps others learn from it.

Your campus just got a national megaphone

Every day, across universities and colleges, students and faculty are building solutions that deserve a national stage. Not someday after they graduate. Not once it becomes big. Right now.

It could be a student team that creates a waste system so workable that it changes everyday habits on campus. It could be a professor or mentor who helps first-generation learners find their footing and opens doors they didn’t think were meant for them. It could be a research group building something that makes life safer, cleaner, or easier, and taking it beyond the pages of papers into real use. These stories carry effort, intent, and outcomes. They also carry possibility.

Better Campus exists to find these stories, document them, and take them beyond the campus gate — to readers, alumni, communities, and institutions who will read them and feel a very simple spark: Wait. We can do this too.

Because that’s how change travels. One campus tries something. Another campus adopts it. A third campus improves it. And soon, what started as a student idea becomes a model.

Editorial buckets: Where does your story fit?

Better Campus is designed to hold many kinds of campus-led change. To make it easier for readers to discover stories — and for contributors to pitch them — we organise every story under one primary editorial bucket. Think of these as pathways, not boxes. If your work sits at the intersection of two, that’s completely okay — we’ll help you place it.

1. Sustainability & Environment: For initiatives that help campuses reduce their environmental footprint and build greener systems — waste-to-resource models, composting, water and energy stewardship, biodiversity efforts, and sustainable campus operations.
   

2. Social Impact: For work that supports people and communities — education access, mentorship programmes, health and mental health initiatives, legal aid, community outreach, volunteering programmes, and any on-ground effort that creates measurable change.
   

3. Innovation & Entrepreneurship: For solutions built on campus that reach real users — student or faculty-led startups, prototypes, tech-for-good products, incubators and E-cells, and research that turns into practical tools or services.
   

4. Culture & Inclusion: For initiatives that make campus life more humane, safe, and inclusive — gender equity work, disability inclusion, mental wellness efforts, safer campus practices, and projects that build cultural or language bridges.
   

5. Beyond the Classroom: For clubs, societies, and peer-led communities that build leadership, empathy, and civic spirit — theatre groups, debate societies, nature clubs, NSS/Rotaract wings, student-led cultural or civic initiatives, and peer-learning groups.

Pick your power: create impact, or capture it

Better Campus welcomes two kinds of participation — and most campuses already have both.

1. There is the Campus Builder: the student entrepreneur, the eco-warrior, the college society president or member, the sports leader, the researcher, the volunteer team, the faculty mentor. You build initiatives. You make systems work. You bring people together. You create impact.

2. And then there is the Creator: the student who notices stories others might miss. The phone filmmaker. The campus storyteller. The one who sees the real hero in a familiar place — and knows how to capture it with respect and clarity. You may not be running the initiative yourself, but you know how to bring it to life for the world to understand.

Better Campus is designed for both — because India needs more changemaking, and it also needs better storytelling around changemaking.

What you get: the megaphone effect

When a campus story is told well, it does something powerful. It gives the people behind it a sense of recognition. It makes their work easier to support. It builds pride on campus. And it helps the idea travel.

Through Better Campus, your work can be featured on The Better India, one of India’s largest positive news platforms, with stories amplified through our website, social media, and the Better Campus microsite.

You also get the chance to grow your storytelling muscles. Better Campus includes an impact storytelling masterclass designed by TBI editors — so that students who want to create content can learn what it means to report honestly, centre people over institutions, and tell stories with dignity and accuracy.

And yes, we know it matters: participants also receive recognition assets such as badges and certificates — plus something that is hard to put a price on: a credible line on your resume that reflects real work and real learning.

Who this is for

Better Campus is for:

1) The Campus Builder: If you’re leading a sustainability initiative, building a social project, starting a venture, running a community programme, or shaping campus culture in any way — we want to hear from you.

2) The Creator: If you’re a student who loves storytelling — and you can spot the people and moments that deserve attention — bring that eye and that energy to Better Campus. Even a phone can be enough when the reporting is honest and the intent is strong.

3) The College: Better Campus also welcomes institutions that want their students’ and faculty’s work to reach a national audience — through stories that are people-first and impact-led, not promotional.

How it works

Getting started is simple. If there’s something meaningful happening on your campus — an initiative, a collective, a solution, a programme, a person-led effort — all you have to do is write to us.

Email us at: [email protected]

In your email, tell us:

• What’s happening (a short, clear description of the initiative/story
  Who’s leading it (names + contact details)

• What impact you’re seeing so far (numbers help, even early ones)

• If you have photos or videos, do share them — they help bring the story alive, but they’re not mandatory.

Once we hear from you, our editorial team will review the submission and reach out if it fits the Better Campus vision. From there, we’ll guide the next steps and take it forward in the right format.

This could be your story

Better Campus is built for that moment when someone reads a story and feels a sense of possibility. The kind that makes a student forward it to their group chat. The kind that makes a faculty member bring it up in a meeting. The kind that makes a campus say, “We should start something like this here.”

If you’re building something. If you’ve noticed someone doing something incredible. If your campus deserves to be seen.

Better Campus is for you.

Write to us at: [email protected]
And let’s tell the story India needs to hear next.