‘Unsafe’ building: Ahmedabad school to relocate students

The school management is most likely to submit a detailed report of the new arrangement with required documents to the District Education Office (DEO) for approval within two-three days after which it will cease to run from the existing building “without any delay”. “Keeping the GERI report into consideration and the safety of everyone in mind, the shifting will not be delayed at all after the DEO permission,” Principal Sister Renuka told The Indian Express.

Ahmedabad City DEO, R M Chaudhary, said the school has been asked to submit the alternate arrangement report as early as possible. “The most likely possibility is to move the students to St Xavier’s High School Loyola Hall that falls under the permissible radius of 5 kms,” he said.

Among the oldest schools in Ahmedabad, Mount Carmel High School, with an area of around two acres, is located at prime locations of Ashram Road in Navrangpura. The main building, comprising ground, first and second floors, was built in 1939, while the second phase (third floor) was completed in 1991.

The ‘all girls’ institute run by Nirmal Education Society is one of the sought after schools in the city. While classes 5-12 are run from the Mount Carmel Primary School in the walled city area Khanpur with around 600 girls, the nearly a century-old building in Navrangpura accommodates 1,250 girls from classes 6-12.

Notably, the school management had submitted a similar structural report based on the findings of a private testing agency earlier this year. The second testing by GERI, a government agency, was necessitated after parents alleged that the safety report was a “conspiracy” by the management for “financial gains”.

The non-destructive testing of concrete conducted at the Material Testing Unit of GERI Vadodara was followed by the inspection of the school building in July. According to the GERI report, of the 152 observations of beams and columns on the ground, first and second floors, only 13 were in the “good category”, while 136 fell under the “doubtful category”. “The non-destructive testing of concrete points out that of total observations, 89.47 per cent falls under the doubtful category. The testing was carried out at 152 points. None of the points fall under the excellent category, 8.55 (13) points fall under the good category and 89.47 per cent (136) under the doubtful category,” the GERI report highlights.

The state board affiliated English medium school is self-financed for classes 1-8 and grant-in-aid for classes 9-12. The Nirmal Education Society also runs schools with similar names in Gandhinagar, Kutch and Mehsana.