When it rains in Ishir Hazarika’s hometown of Berkeley Heights, streets turn into fast-moving rivers. Water gushes out of manholes and toilets in basements overflow.
In the summer of 2023, Hazarika created a video that showed the devastating effects of flooding in the township as an intern for the mayor’s office. After town officials showed the video to their Congressional representatives in Washington, Berkeley Heights received $2 million to upgrade the municipal sewer system.
“I don’t want to toot my own horn,” Hazarika says, “but I think some of the work that I did definitely helped out.”
Hazarika’s interest in the environment began when he was six years old and visiting India, his parents’ native country. Each summer, his family would drive to Kaziranga National Park, a breeding ground for elephants, rhinoceroses, tigers and other wildlife.
As he grew older, Hazarika noticed that the park was deteriorating. So in his junior year of high school, he created a nonprofit called the Tree Alliance, which raised more than $2,500 to help restore the park’s natural habitat.
The nonprofit also held a series of workshops in Berkeley Heights to promote tree planting, since the township had received a grant to fund more trees but few residents had taken advantage of it.
“I realized that with the Tree Alliance, I could not only educate people about what’s happening in Kaziranga National Park in India, but also about environmental issues overall,” he says.
While interning for the mayor’s office last summer, Hazarika also worked on a research project on solar and wind energy in India with a professor at Baruch College in New York. After graduating from Rutgers, Hazarika, a Presidential Scholarship recipient, hopes to help companies transition to more sustainable business practices.
“I want to find a way to bridge the gap for companies that want to become more environmentally conscious but don’t want to hurt their profit margins,” he says.
FULL SOURCE: Rutgers Today | Rutgers Welcomes the Class of 2028