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October 2017 Edition of Power Politics is updated.  Happy Diwali to all our subscribers and Distributors       October 2017 Edition of Power Politics is updated.   Happy Diwali to all our subscribers and Distributors       
Issue:Sep' 2017

UNSAFE SCHOOLS

It's the same story in MP

N D Sharma

So much about the state of school education in the National Capital Region (NCR) in the recent past.
What about education in the the state of Madhya Pradesh today ? Teachers kept engaged in non-teaching activities and the government more interested in gimmicks than in serious work. That, in nutshell, should give an idea of the conditions of schools in Madhya Pradesh.
No wonder that the schools in the State, both private and governmentrun, are a very unsafe place for children, to put it mildly. When something untoward takes place in a school and it is highlighted in the media, the standard response of the government is to repeat instructions on the safety of children, sometimes by changing the language here and there. When a serious offence like rape or death of a student is reported, the government just leaves it to the police as if it were a routine crime.
Early in September a teacher of a government school in Singrauli district blackened the faces of five students of class 6th with coal and then paraded them through the streets of the village. Their fault? They had not attended the classes for two days. The parents of the children complained to the principal but in vain. They then went to the district headquarters and lodged their complaint with Collector Anurag Chaudhary who promised action after an inquiry against the teacher and was said to have observed that nobody could be allowed to humiliate the students publicly.

MP teacher blackens students' faces, parades them on street The blackening of faces of students in a faraway place like Singrauli district will appear a minor incident in comparison to what is happening in the places near the State Capital. In Sehore, hardly 20 kms away from Bhopal, the 45-year-old principal of a government school was said to have molested an eighth class girl on the school campus. It was only after the parents of the 14-year old girl created ruckus that the police sprang into action and booked the principal under Section 354 IPC (use of criminal force on woman with the intent to outrage her modesty) and the relevant provisions of Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POSCO) Act. The principal had reportedly claimed that he had only scolded the girl after he had found a love letter in her book.
In August, a nursery student of a private primary school in Gwalior complained of pain in lower part of her body after returning from school.
Her medical examination showed that a rape attempt was made on her. As many schools in the city remained closed as a protest, the police took up the case. From the photographs of the school staff, the girl identified the offender who was the school bus driver. He was booked under relevant sections of POSCO Act and IPC. Only after five days, the director of the school and the school's PRO were also booked under the provisions of POSCO Act for not cooperating with the parents when they had first approached the school with the complaint and not informing the police about the incident.
A 16-year-old boy, studying in a prominent private school in Indore, was electrocuted on the school premises. He was playing football with friends on the school grounds on a Sunday afternoon in September. As the ball went out of the campus, he climbed on an iron bench kept along the boundary wall to ask someone outside to throw the ball in. as soon as he touched the mesh, he was electrocuted. It was found during the investigation that electricity had spread to the iron mesh on the wall through the water cooler kept near it.
The students informed the warden who rushed the boy to hospital where he was declared 'brought dead'. The police were immediately informed but in view of the high profile of the school management, they were in no hurry to register a case A class fifth student of a public school in Chhindwara had a tiff with some classmate on September 8. His teacher reportedly thrashed him and threatened to call the police. The boy was so upset that he went home and set himself afire. He died in a Nagpur hospital a week later. Four days after that, the principal, director and a teacher of the school were booked for abetment to suicide.
A public school in Shyopur expelled mid-session in September two First Standard students, both brothers, because of non-payment of fees, even though they were exempted from payment of fee under the Below Poverty Line (BPL) quota. The fee demanded was Rs 30,000 for two years. The Collector and the District Education Officer (DEO) had taken cognisance of the matter and were investigating. The children had revealed that they were told by the school authorities that they did not deserve to study as they were too poor and did not even bring their own lunch.
While the government-run schools suffer from their own malady, most of the private schools are run more like shops than institutions imparting education. The teachers there are illpaid and work under uncertainty about their service. Ill-treatment of children, particularly of girls, in school bus are not uncommon. The usual response of the government is to issue an order making it mandatory for school management to have at least one female attendant in every school bus. The schools manage to depute a female in the bus for some time. When an incident of molestation or some other infraction in a school bus is reported again, the 'mandatory' order is re-issued.
Perhaps a major reason of sad state of affairs in government-run schools is the treatment of teachers who are considered no more than pegs on which to hang any linen. For instance, some time back Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan presided over a government-organised mass marriages programme under the scheme known as 'Mukhyamantri Kanyadaan Yojana' in Singrauli where 2400 girls were married off. Teachers of schools in the vicinity were given duties as 'waiters' with specific assignments spelled out in the government order as to who would serve vegetables, who would serve rice, who would serve water, who would serve salad, who would serve sweet dish so on and so on.

While the government-run schools suffer from their own malady, most of the private schools are run more like shops than institutions imparting education. The teachers there are ill-paid and work under uncertainty about their service. Ill-treatment of children, particularly of girls, in school bus are not uncommon. The usual response of the government is to issue an order making it mandatory for school management to have at least one female attendant in every school bus.

At other times the teachers had been given whistles with which to warn those going out for defecation. On other occasions, their duties consisted of keeping a watch on shoes and chappals outside temples. More recently, the district education officer of Tikamgarh had issued an order directing teachers to dig holes for toilets in rural area as part of the Centre's 'Swachhata hi Seva' (Cleanliness Is The Service) programme.
Following the nation-wide uproar as a seven-year-old child was killed by the bus driver in Gurugram and the rape of a five-year-old girl allegedly by the peon of a Delhi school, MP's Minister of School Education Kunwar Vijay Shah seemed to have become aware that school children needed safety also. Promptly, he issued a slew of instructions: the State government will recommend cancellation of recognition of school in case of negligence of students' safety; the State government will cancel the recognition of schools if they don't appoint female attendant in school buses; teachers should carry out inspection of the schools in their areas (that apparently is, in addition to various non-teaching duties assigned to them from time to time); there should be monthly health check of students in schools.
It's not that Shah was sitting idle earlier. In order to strengthen 'nationalistic approach' (as he put it) among students, he has instructed that all students in Satna district should answer the roll call with 'Jai Hind' instead of 'Yes Sir and Yes Madam'. He said this mission would be implemented all over the State both in government and private schools later on. His department has also issued an order directing all the schools to purchase radio sets so that the teachers and students could hear Chief Minister Chouhan's radio address 'Dil Se'. (Chouhan has recently started this radio address on the lines of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's 'Mann ki Baat').
Another notification issued by the department says: 'all employees --- teaching and non-teaching staff working in State-run and private schools – will have to take a pledge that they do not have any criminal record under POCSO Act and Juvenile Justice Act and also have to declare that they have never been convicted of sexually harming any child'.