BHUBANESWAR: Despite claims of the government over providing safe drinking water to all in mission mode, thousands of schools in the state continue to be deprived of tap water supply for drinking and cooking of mid-day meals.
As per a report on the availability of potable water in schools placed in the Lok Sabha by the minister of state for Jal Shakti Rajeev Chandrasekhar this month, 30 per cent of schools in Odisha including government, aided and government-aided don’t have potable water. The minister quoted the statistics from the Unified District Information System for Education (UDISE) database in the response.
As of December 19, of 53, 997 schools (all managements) in the state, 37,668 (69.7 per cent) schools have tap water connections. Sources said among all states, Odisha is at the lowest followed by Meghalaya which has 64.3 per cent of schools with tap water supply. Eleven states including Telangana, Kerala, and Andhra Pradesh have tap water provision in all their schools.
The Ministry of Education’s Department of School Education and Literacy launched a scheme, Samagra Shiksha, in 2018-19 to strengthen water and sanitation infrastructure in government schools. In 2020, the Jal Shakti Ministry also launched a 100-day campaign last year for 100 per cent of government schools and anganwadis to have potable tap water supply and tap water in toilets.
However, even after the scheme and campaign, not all schools could be covered till now even as the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009, mandates both the Centre and the state to provide infrastructure including drinking water and toilet facilities in schools. The situation, though, is better when it comes to toilets in schools. The report states that 43,501 toilets in schools have been constructed or reconstructed under Swachh Bharat’s Swachh Vidyalaya initiative.