Missing: boundary walls, bathrooms, blackboards

Why in the News

Government schools across Bihar, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh are running without boundary walls, functional wash rooms, sufficient classrooms or electricity. Children in several of them sit on verandas, under trees, or in a single room shared with storage almirahs and meal utensils. A citizen audit campaign called ‘School thik karo’, run by the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) since 15 August, asks residents to download a checklist, audit their local school and post the findings, covering drinking water, boundary walls, wash rooms and midday meals. These schools have sanctioned buildings, sanctioned teaching posts and an annual maintenance head in the budget. What is absent is the capacity to convert those into a room a child can sit in. State attention has meanwhile moved to a small tier of flagship institutions.

What did the four State ground reports find?

1. Bihar, schools operating without a facility of any kind: Three schools in Muzaffarpur and Vaishali districts run without a boundary wall, a wash room or storage for midday meal supplies.
2. A primary school of 119 students, established in 1982, has plaster falling from the corridor its two classrooms open onto. Its six teachers use neighbours’ bathrooms and the children go in the open.
3. A middle school of 283 students has two rooms, so Class 8 sits on the veranda and Classes 1 and 2 sit under a tree behind the kitchen.
4. A primary school in Vaishali has no building of its own. It runs 91 students across Classes 1 to 5 in a single room of a community centre, alongside department almirahs and meal utensils.
5. Rajasthan, the approach to the school is itself the barrier: In Unchki village of Deeg district there is no public road to the school, so students walk through a graveyard and a muddy path to reach it.
6. Corridors serve as classrooms in three schools of the district, and one teacher takes Classes 4 and 5 together for want of rooms or electricity.
7. None of the three has functional wash rooms, so children walk home in the middle of the school day and return.
8. The district falls within the National Capital Region and lies 165 km from Delhi.
9. Uttar Pradesh, the cost of a dirty wash room: A cab driver in Lucknow is moving his 11 year old daughter out of a government primary school after a prolonged urinary tract infection that the family attributes to the school’s wash room.
10. The transfer costs an additional Rs 4,000 a month, which the household is meeting by cutting other spending.
11. Drinking water at the school arrives intermittently and the wash room’s water supply is often dysfunctional, so students fetch water from nearby houses.
12. Madhya Pradesh, buildings condemned and services withdrawn: A middle school in Hirapur village of Sehore district runs eight classes in three rooms, after the primary block on the same premises was abandoned six months ago.
13. Its 22 students sit on mats without benches, in rooms with dim lighting, broken almirahs, fans that do not work and rainwater seeping through the roof.
14. One of the two student wash rooms is functional, so girls and boys use the same toilet.
15. The self help group contracted to cook the midday meal stopped three months ago, and the school in charge is buying ration himself while awaiting reimbursement.
16. A second school 20 km away, of 104 students, has had its electricity connection cut because water leaking through the ceiling was reaching the wiring.

Where does the teaching itself break down?

1. Attendance runs at roughly half the roll: Teachers at the three Rajasthan schools say 50 to 60 percent of enrolled students come on a given day, and they attribute part of that absence to the infrastructure.
2. Posted teachers are absent or shared: At one Rajasthan school neither of the two teachers came on the day of the visit, and a teacher posted elsewhere visits only after finishing his own school day.
3. Senior classes go unstaffed: At the Madhya Pradesh school of 104 students, all three teachers for Classes 6 to 8 were on leave and the principal was away at a training exercise, leaving two primary teachers in charge.
4. The commute eats the school day: One headmaster travels 15 km each way and a teacher 40 km daily by motorcycle to reach schools in rural Bihar.
5. Staff are under orders not to speak: Teachers in the Rajasthan schools said their supervisors had instructed them not to speak to the media, so their complaints surface only anonymously.

Why do repairs not happen even when schools ask for them?

1. The annual grant cannot fund a repair: One Madhya Pradesh school receives Rs 25,000 a year for miscellaneous works, which is spent on hiring a worker once a month to clean the wash rooms.
2. Proposals go unanswered for years: That school has sent annual repair proposals for five years without a response, over the same period its building has been in poor condition.
3. The panchayat fills the gap the department leaves: Its floor, boundary wall and gate were built by the village panchayat after a school alumnus became its head.
4. Budget is the stated reason given to schools: Rajasthan teachers say district authorities answer requests for more classrooms by citing the absence of budget, while the District Magistrate’s position is that complaints are acted on quickly and vacancies filled regularly.
5. Attention has moved to a flagship tier: A State School Education Department official says the focus in Madhya Pradesh has been on Sandipani Schools, earlier called CM Rise, and Excellence schools, so small rural schools have struggled for basic infrastructure.

Who stays in these schools, and who leaves?

1. The exit has a price: A private school near the Rajasthan cluster costs about Rs 18,000 a year, which a grandparent says rules out sending all his grandchildren to one.
2. Enrolment collapses where an alternative exists: The Madhya Pradesh middle school runs eight classes for fewer children than a single functioning class would hold, and the school in charge says dominant communities in the village send their children to private schools.
3. Those who remain are the poorest: Most of the students left at that school are from marginalised communities, and its neglect tracks who is left in it.
4. Residents read the neglect as targeted: Locals around the Rajasthan schools allege that their requests are ignored because they live in predominantly Muslim areas.
5. The reason parents give is not academic: The Lucknow parent cites a peaceful atmosphere in which a child can concentrate, not examination results, as what the private school offers.

Conclusion

A school counts as functioning in the record when it has a building, a sanctioned staff strength and a maintenance head in the budget. None of those three states whether a child can sit in a lit room, use a toilet, or eat a cooked meal that day. The forward move is to make the release of school funds conditional on periodic physical verification of those conditions, rather than on the return the school files about itself. Until that link exists, the audit is being done by residents with a downloaded checklist while departmental records show nothing wrong.

Back2Basics: Sandipani Schools, earlier CM Rise Schools

1. What they are: A Madhya Pradesh government programme creating a tier of well resourced composite schools, running from the pre primary stage to Class 12 on a single campus.
2. What they provide: Selected schools receive upgraded buildings, laboratories, libraries, digital classrooms and transport for students drawn from surrounding villages.
3. How they differ from an ordinary school: They are a small, high investment tier rather than a universal upgrade, so a district holds a handful of them alongside its regular government schools.
4. Why the name changed: The schools were launched as CM Rise Schools and were later renamed Sandipani Vidyalaya.

Matching Previous Year Question

“[2022, GS2, 15 marks] The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009 remains inadequate in promoting incentive-based system for children’s education without generating awareness about the importance of schooling. Analyse.”