THE STATES

Hard way to learn

T.K. RAJALAKSHMI

Unauthorised, ill-equipped private schools and the very poor infrastructure of many government schools together present a miserable picture of basic education in Delhi.

At a school run by the Municipal Corporation of Delhi.

EVEN as the nation struggles to come to terms with the tragic death of 94 schoolchildren at Kumbakonam in Thanjavur district of Tamil Nadu, it may be shocking to learn that the state of affairs in many schools in the national capital is no better. In fact, there has been a proliferation of unauthorised schools. In many of the authorised ones run by the government or the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD), the infrastructure is of appalling quality. In some cases people have been forced to seek redress through legal action.

In 1997, the Delhi unit of the All India Lawyers' Union (AILU) filed a petition in the Delhi High Court highlighting the severe lack of basic amenities, including safety measures, in government schools and sought appropriate directions for the remedy of the same. In 2002, Social Jurist, a group of lawyers that has been working for the rights of the indigent to education, filed a similar petition. While hearings on both petitions are continuing, orders have been passed from time to time by the High Court giving relief on specific issues raised by the petitioners.

The AILU petition, against the MCD, the Government of Delhi and the Union government, raised the issue of neglect of the management and functioning of primary schools, and the existence of school buildings that were declared dangerous by the Works Department of the MCD. The petitioners sought directions from the court to ensure that schools provided basic amenities such as drinking water, toilets, electricity, fans and desks and also complied with safety norms.

The petitioners submitted that under the terms of the provisions of Section 42(r) of the Delhi Municipal Corporation Act, 1957, the establishment and maintenance of schools for primary education was one of the statutory functions of the corporation. There are around 1,755 primary schools being run by the MCD at 1,310 sites, in which more than eight lakh children study. The MCD-run schools cater mainly to the nursery and the primary level of schooling, while the Delhi Government-managed schools are meant for the secondary and higher secondary stages of school education.

The petition filed by the AILU contended that 64 primary school buildings with 327 classrooms had been declared dangerous by the Works Department several years ago and no steps had been taken either to demolish or to reconstruct them or provide alternatives. Terming the state of the schools as deplorable, the petition contended that either there were no school buildings at all or where there were buildings, "they are about to come crashing down". Students attended classes in tents where there were no buildings, it said. In fact, in May 1997, the officials of the Education Department of the MCD submitted a list of municipal buildings that were in a highly deplorable condition. In some schools, the roofs and doors were damaged and anti-social elements often walked in uninterrupted. There were around 137 primary schools being run under tents, with no mattresses provided for the children to even sit on. These schools had no electricity, drinking water or boundary walls. "The lives of the children are always at risk," the petition stated.

Ashok Aggarwal, one of the advocates representing the AILU and Social Jurist, said that he recently learnt of yet another school that had no power supply for over a month. Nearly 4,000 children were enrolled and classes were held in two shifts of 2,000 each. In another school, he said, windows opened into the classrooms, with the result that children were at risk of hitting their heads against them each time they got up. He said that during their inspections, garbage was often found piled up near the schools, most of it inflammable material. Upon inquiring, he was told that the school staff would burn the garbage within the school premises.

Aggarwal said that at one such school where the MCD had opened a medical dispensary, syringes were left lying around and children picked them up. "Here at the MCD primary school at Bawana, there were around 12 rooms and one multi-purpose room. The MCD took all the rooms for its office work and the common room to run its dispensary, while the children studied in tents. We got an order from the High Court and got the MCD to shift the dispensary and vacate the classrooms," said Aggarwal. In the case of the Naveen Primary School in Shahdara, East Delhi, the petitioners got an order from the court, directing the MCD to vacate within 24 hours the rooms it had occupied. "Here, the MCD had taken up the rooms for the payment of House Tax," said Aggarwal.

According to an evaluation report of MCD-run primary schools prepared by the evaluation unit of the Delhi government in 2001, there are 1,275 school sites that have 1,802 schools in 12 zones. For the evaluation, 636 school sites were selected, where 937 schools were found operating. First, a shortage of 1,055 classrooms was found. There were 25 fully tin-roofed schools with 251 classrooms and 28 partly tin-roofed schools with 179 classrooms. In 43 schools, there were no facilities for drinking water; in 207 schools, the drinking water provided was not sufficient. Around 318 schools had toilets without water, while 16 schools did not have toilet blocks. As many as 113 schools did not have separate toilet blocks for girls. As for maintenance, 34.28 per cent of the schools needed repairs to the roof, 28.3 per cent needed repairs of walls, 25.62 per cent needed repairs of the floor and 47.96 per cent needed repairs to windows/doors; 47.94 needed repairs to toilet blocks; 28.8 per cent schools needed their entrance gates repaired; and 37.5 per cent needed repairs to boundary walls.

On September 2, 2003, clubbing three writ petitions filed by Social Jurist and the AILU, the Delhi High Court directed the MCD and the Director of Education to carry out repairs and provide infrastructure in the schools found deficient and observed that 50 per cent of the schools examined (by the evaluation unit) presented a poor picture. The two-Judge Bench observed: "We can just imagine the position in other schools."

Aggarwal says that the Education Department of the Delhi government admits that the school buildings constructed by the Works Department are of poor quality. The normal life of a school is around 30 years, but in certain schools the construction was so poor that they became unsafe after a few years of construction. "Why do they make such schools in the first place, which have such a short life span?" said Aggarwal. From time to time, the High Court has sought explanation from the relevant authorities regarding the infrastructure in schools including sub-standard construction of classrooms and the non-availability of potable water. "If things can be pushed a little, then a lot can be achieved," says Aggarwal.

The monitoring of government schools is not the only issue. According to Social Jurist, there are around 10,000 unauthorised schools operating in the capital territory with about six lakh children studying in them. Several of these schools are for primary and pre-primary children. Many of them, Social Jurist says, hold examinations and issue certificates. There is the added aspect of unrecognised, unregistered feeder schools run by unaided but recognised schools. Some unrecognised schools are run by individuals who have an understanding with certain government, government-aided and recognised private schools for the purpose of public examination.

"It is nothing but a big racket to exploit hapless parents in the name of so-called quality education by the private schools," says Aggarwal. It was more than a decade ago, in 1992, that a high-power committee was set up on Education Legislation by the Delhi government. It noted in its report that "some important provisions like registration of schools are entirely missing from the present Act (Delhi School Education Act, 1973), with the result that nobody knew how many unrecognised schools are functioning in Delhi. In the absence of any regulation for such schools, several of them are allegedly exploiting the children and their parents and providing sub-standard education in congested and crowded premises without adequate facilities of good drinking water and fresh air." The Yash Pal Committee, which was set up by the Ministry of Human Resource Development in 1992 to suggest ways of reducing the academic burden on schoolchildren, observed in its report that norms for granting recognition to private schools should be made more stringent. This would, it said, prove helpful in improving the quality of learning on the one hand and arrest the growing commercialisation of schools on the other.

But unauthorised schools continue to proliferate despite the fact that no school can run without the permission of the Director of Education. The safety norms in these schools can only be imagined. It is the responsibility of the State government concerned to ensure that unregulated mushrooming of schools does not take place. But in a situation where government agencies have to be goaded into action through court orders, parallel and private systems of education will flourish without any accountability.

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