A civic mess: At SDMC school, missing teachers, unusable toilets

The 10-year-old says he counted 34 students in his class on the first day, but only some wanted to be his friend. His teacher was missing on both days. Teachers were missing in other classrooms, too, prompting a constant din in the school. In one classroom, the boys, packed three to a bench, sit around chatting. School authorities later said most of the teachers were at a training programme for the civic polls. Parents say it doesn’t matter if teachers are around; the boys anyway play more than they study.

So, around 3.20 pm on a warm Thursday afternoon in an empty classroom, the 10-year-old and three of his friends perch on two broken benches, eating the mid-day meal dished into their tiffin boxes by school helpers. One set of women serving the food wore surgical masks and gloves; the other three didn’t bother with any such protection.

“My mother couldn’t afford the private school fee anymore so she enrolled me here,” he says. His mother works as a helper in a company, while his father is a daily wager.

He visited the toilets six times over the three hours he spent in school, but never used it. “Saare toilets mein potty padi rehti hai,” he says. “I also saw a teacher walk over to use the toilet, see the mess and decide against it,” he adds.

Downstairs in the schoolyard, boys stand near the toilet complex and urinate directly on the ground, into a large pool of water and urine. “Chee,” yells one boy after opening the toilet doors and spotting faeces on the floor.

The stench was worse when Salma’s son was studying here. Salma, from the neighbouring Gadda Colony, is at the school to rectify an error in her son’s transfer certificate. Since MCD schools only cater to students up to Class V, he has now moved to a government school. “His father’s name had to be changed so we’ve been sitting here since morning. The facilities here are very bad. Boys used to urinate in the schoolyard, but now it’s been confined to near the toilets,” she says.

Jaitpur is a village on the east of Badarpur — near the Haryana border— prompting many from the state, like Sita, to cross over and enrol her children here. “Children from Haryana don’t get admission easily in Delhi schools,” she says, seated next to a long queue of parents waiting to fill forms to admit their children. Sita sends her son to an English-medium school in the morning. She hopes to drop him off at this Hindi-medium school by mid-day. “I have noticed the facilities here are not very good, but let’s see how he likes it,” she says.

A six-year-old, who will be in the same class as Sita’s son, meanwhile waits for his father to pick him up. The father, a peon at a private school nearby, says he cannot afford the fee to enrol his child there. “This school does not have any facilities. Even if you look past the problems with the toilets and the food, my son does not learn anything. The teacher plays games on his phone all day and children just run around,” he adds.

An education department official with the SDMC acknowledges the gaps in the system. “We are aware there are issues with sanitation in the school. The school is over-populated and our plan is to hire sanitary workers from outside for all schools that have over 3,000 students,” he says. There are 10-12 such big schools under SDMC.

“We have allocated Rs 20,000 per shift on a monthly basis to provide sanitary services under the Swachh Bharat Mission,” says the official, adding that the school has requested for additional toilets, work on which will begin over the summer holidays in May.

Narsingh Shah, who claims to be the local councillor — even though his wife won from Jaitpur on an NCP ticket in 2012 — says he has “never received any complaints from parents”. “But I have personally taken up the issue of unclean facilities several times in house meetings at the MCD headquarters. The BJP, which runs the civic bodies, does not care about cleanliness,” he says.

Outside the principal’s office, parents stand in a long queue. The principal, who did not wish to be named, is visually impaired and says he took charge recently. Behind him is a blackboard with a large lotus drawn in chalk, along with the words ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’ and ‘Swachh Bharat Shreshtha Bharat’.