After experimenting with school reforms in government high school at Saspol, SECMOL launched Operation New Hope in collaboration with the government education department and the village population. In 1988, after his graduation, Wangchuk (with his brother and five peers) started Students' Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh (SECMOL). He also went for two years of higher studies in Earthen Architecture at Craterre School of Architecture in Grenoble, France, in 2011. Due to differences with his father over the choice of engineering stream, he had to finance his own education. in Mechanical Engineering from National Institute of Technology Srinagar (then REC Srinagar) in 1987. Unable to bear the treatment, in 1977 he escaped alone to Delhi where he pleaded his case to the school principal at Vishesh Kendriya Vidyalaya. He recalls this period as the darkest part of his life. Since he looked different compared to the other students, he would get addressed in a language that he did not understand, due to which his lack of responsiveness was mistaken for him being stupid. At the age of 9, he was taken to Srinagar and enrolled in a school there. His father Sonam Wangyal, a politician who later became the minister in state government, was stationed in Srinagar. His mother taught him all the basics in his own mother tongue until that age. He was not enrolled in a school until the age of 9, as there were not any schools in his village. Wangchuk was born in 1966 in Uleytokpo, near Alchi in the Leh district of Ladakh. He invented the Ice Stupa technique that creates artificial glaciers, used for storing winter water in form of conical shaped ice heap.
Wangchuk was instrumental in the launch of Operation New Hope in 1994, a collaboration of government, village communities and the civil society to bring reforms in the government school system. He is also known for designing the SECMOL campus that runs on solar energy and uses no fossil fuels for cooking, lighting or heating. He is the founding-director of the Students' Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh (SECMOL), which was founded in 1988 by a group of students who had been in his own words, the 'victims' of an alien education system foisted on Ladakh.
Sonam Wangchuk (born 1 September 1966) is an Indian engineer, innovator and education reformist. Global Award for Sustainable Architecture (2017) Īshoka Fellowship for Social Entrepreneurship (2002)
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