Endless acres of land covered in yellow mustard glisten in the winter sun. In between are deep violet onion shoots springing out of vegetable patches. The scene paints a deceptive picture of abundance in the Nagina block of Nuh district in Haryana.
Closer to Padodiyabass village in Nagina block, children from Class 1 to 5 revise maths tables, their shrill chorus heard from a few meters away. The 30-odd children are seated under a shady neem tree with six cows to keep them company. The open space under the tree also doubles up as their classroom. The cows sip on cool water from a large concrete container, but there is no sight of a school building, toilets, or drinking water for the school children. All of these are prerequisites to run a school in India. As evening approaches, the eager children neatly form a line and tread back home through the fluorescent green fields. A herd of goats rush in through the gates to occupy the shed.
“Over the past four years, I have been scrambling for space in Padodiyabass after the school was made functional on paper by UDISE registration,” says Hari Ram, the school teacher who has been posted in at the Government Primary School in Padodiyabass. UDISE, the Unified District Information System for Education, is a database of schools in India run by the Department of School Education and Literacy, under the Ministry of Education.
Data from UDISE from the District Education Office show that the Government Primary School (GPS) in Padodiyabass features among 19 primary schools in Nuh district declared ‘buildingless’. The District Education Department has been unable to construct a building for them, despite allotting them a UDISE code in 2018-19.
Over the last six years, the schools have been running out makeshift spaces: under trees, in animal sheds, in homes, or at a village chaupal (community space). On paper, besides a building, a school should have an open playground with an impregnable boundary wall for the children’s safety.
Alladin, 58, who lent his shed to run the school says, “The school has been shifted thrice. Before this, it was running out of another villager’s shed, and for some time even out of someone’s house.”
Out of 500 government primary schools in Nuh district, 10 of these building-less schools function out of Firozepur Jhirka block, four are in Taoru block, three in Nagina, one each in Nuh and Punhana blocks. The Hindu visited four of these schools: GPS Kubdabass, GPS Ghatwasan, GPS Malibass in Firozepur Jhirka block; and GPS Padodiyabass in Nagina.
None had an assigned building, a toilet, drinking water, or electricity. There were no sports or play equipment in sight. In Padodiyabass, the teaching learning material was stacked in an animal shed, and the teachers were worried the rain would ruin it.
Squeezing out space for children
According to the Right To Education (RTE) Act, 2009, there should be one primary school accessible to children in the radius of 1 kilometre within the village. But 10 years later, children of Kubdabass were still traveling 3.5 km away to Rawli village to access the nearest school.
In 2019, when villagers of Kubdabass started demanding that a primary school be allocated to them according to these norms, the Education Department allotted them a UDISE code and a teacher was allocated. Mahesh Kumar, 27, a contractual teaching assistant, who was assigned GPS Kubdabass was shocked on his first day on the job in 2022. “The school merely existed on paper; there was no building,” Kumar says.
Kumar knocked on the doors of the people of Kubdabass, asking them to send their children to ‘school’. He chose a shady tree near the village well, and with a single rug and a black board, started holding classes there for children up to 11 years. The villagers started getting increasingly concerned for the safety of their children who were studying out in the open.
A government primary school run in a century-old dilapadated building in Kubdabass village, Nuh district, Haryana.
| Photo Credit:
MOORTHY RV
“The mouth of the well had to be closed. We were scared of a mishap. During the monsoon, snakes would creep out of the bushes,” says Goggan Haji Mahtab, 60, a Kubdabass resident.
As a makeshift measure, the villagers in Kubdabass spread some rugs over the kaccha mud floor of an over 100-year-old dilapidated room. They etched the UDISE code 06204100131 on the building, where now up to 60 children study. It houses Classes 1 to 5, and the bal vatika or playschool. The room is a village chaupal where in the evening, residents gather to discuss local matters. “There is still no boundary wall, no drinking water, no toilets, and no hot-cooked midday meals,” says Kumar.
Mahtab adds that the village gets electricity only for six hours a day, and so many children in an overcrowded room, in an area where temperatures soar to 48 degrees Centigrade, is another challenge. “There is always a fear of a roof collapse,” he says.
Unique challenges
District education officials allege that buildings for these 19 schools have not been constructed as the Gram Panchayats of the villages have not allotted land to build the schools.
Each village has unique challenges. In Kubdabass, the village is designed in such a way that there is a dearth of pattey ki zameen, which is land under the Panchayat’s control within a kilometre’s radius of the village. “All land patches in the village are privately owned. The government will have to try and acquire land by providing compensation. No villager will voluntarily offer up his land for free,” says Ashfak Ali, a social worker in Firozepur Jhirka block, under which the village falls. “When the government can acquire land for massive infrastructure projects by providing compensation, why can’t they do this for building schools?”
In another case, UDISE records specify that a Government Primary School in Ghatwasan village is running out of a private house as land has not been provided by the Gram Panchayat. On ground, nearly 50 villagers at Ghatwasan walk to an acre of pattey ki zameen or panchayat land they have carved out for the school building. This was done over a year ago in coordination with the village Sarpanch.
The two-room structure in Ghatwasan village which serves as the primary school ‘building’.
| Photo Credit:
MOORTHY RV
Now, in the two-room house that children currently call ‘school,’ 30 sacks of rice lay stacked a corner. As the application for a new school building gathers dust at government offices, thousands of ants form neat lines, making their way towards the rice, through crevices of the half broken doors of the crumbling structure.
Robin Khan, Sarpanch of Ghatwasan village maintains a bulky file of letters he has written to the District Education Office at Nuh requesting them to process the village’s application at the district and State levels, so that ultimately the land can be transferred to the State government. “It is only after the land is transferred, will the Central funds for constructing the school building be released. We have been running around for a year trying to getting a building constructed,” Khan says.
‘Punishment’ postings
Located nearly 100 km away from India’s capital Delhi, official appointments in the district of Nuh have always been viewed as ‘punishment postings’. At the District Education Office Pramjeet Chahal, Nuh’s District Education Officer (DEO) is juggling duties of four other senior posts which lie vacant: that of the District Elementary Education Officer (DEEO), heads of District Institute for Educational Training (DIET) and Block Institute for Educational Training (BIET), and the District Programme Coordinator for Samagra Shiksha, the central government’s flagship scheme that provides budgetary support for schools.
Chahal, who was formerly the principal of the DIET in Gurugram was appointed by an expert panel to weed out corruption in the district’s education department.
He sits uneasily on the chair of the District Elementary Education Officer, Mukesh Yadav, who had been in the position for a year, before being put behind bars, along with the former DEO Ramphal Dhankar, last year. They were caught by the Anti-Corruption Bureau, Haryana, when Dhankar was accepting a bribe of ₹10 lakh for favouring a firm in procurement of school benches.
According to latest data obtained from the District Elementary Education Officer, as on November 14, 2024 up to 48% of the 7,906 teaching staff posts in primary schools are vacant.
“Out of the 30 teachers selected by the State in the academic year 2023-24, only three joined. It shows how teachers don’t like Nuh as a place of posting,” a senior district education official says.
A teacher of a primary school in Padodiyabass teaching students beside an open field, with no arrangement for toilets, drinking water or electricity.
| Photo Credit:
MOORTHY RV
To remedy this situation, the Mewat Development Agency (MDA) that plays a role in the area’s socio-economic growth, joined hands with non-profits and started recruiting Shiksha Sahayaks or Teacher Assistants in 2022. Newly graduated teachers were paid a monthly salary of ₹17,000, as a makeshift measure.
In the school at Malibass village in Firozepur Jhirka, two teacher’s assistants sit with close to 50 children clustered in a single dark room. “We have been employed on a contractual basis, and there has been no raise in our pay for three years now. Last year, the renewal occurred after a delay of three months, leading to a late start in the academic year, only in September,” says Rekha Saini, 26, a teacher assistant at the school. This also meant a break in pay. At times their salaries are delayed by two or three months, she adds. They did not get paid in November, which is also the time when Diwali is celebrated.
The lack of educational facilities exacerbates the problem of children skipping school or dropping out altogether. In 2023-24, according to data obtained from DEO, 4,446 children from Classes 1 to 8 dropped out of school. Officials claim they were able to track 3,926 of these students and enrol them in 177 Kadam Centres to help them bridge the learning gap that they had accrued due to missing school. Kadam Centres are run by the international non-profit Humana People to People that addresses developmental challenges.
At least 520 children who dropped out, have slipped through the cracks. They have not returned to school.
A land of paradox
“All schools ranging from primary to secondary receive between ₹25,000 and ₹1 lakh as an annual grant for running and maintenance, under the central Samagra Shiksha scheme,” says a senior district education official working with the Prime Minister’s Schools for Rising India (PM-SHRI). This is for repairs, building toilets, replacing old equipment, paying for electricity and internet, conducting competitions, paying for transport if students are referred to a hosiptal under the school health programme, among others.
However, another 13 schools have been chosen to receive additional funding under the PM-SHRI scheme. Nuh is under the Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s pet project ‘Aspirational Districts Programme’ which aims to transform 112 most under-developed districts across India.
Education officials say that in Nuh students have little or no access to television or cell phones at home. In February this year, 2,500 students from 50 schools of Nuh from Class 6 to 12, were filled into buses and driven to Delhi, nearly 100 km away on a day picnic to see the spring blooms in Rashtrapati Bhavan’s Amrit Udyan.
“It was a wondrous sight to see 40-storey tall buildings, planes landing at the airport near Dhaula Kuan, and the rapid scale of urbanization so close to us. It was a completely strange universe,” says Chahal. He remembers some of the children gawking at these sights, saying, ‘Is this also our India?’
Published – December 15, 2024 07:31 pm IST
