CUTTACK: The Orissa High Court on Tuesday directed School and Mass Education secretary Aswathy S to draw up a detailed action plan to ensure basic facilities such as classrooms, bench and desks, potable water, toilets, electricity, etc. in primary schools in the state.
The court expected Aswathy to personally undertake the exercise by first calling for report from each of the district education officers (DEOs) on actual condition of the primary and upper primary schools indicating availability of all basic facilities.
The division bench of Chief Justice S Muralidhar and Justice M S Raman said, “When the next academic year begins all the primary and upper primary schools in the state must have most of the basic facilities. The exercise has to be taken on war footing.”
“The court is conscious that in the recent budget that has been passed by the state government funds must have been allocated for this very purpose and it is essential that it is used for that purpose at the earliest possible time so that the benefit reaches all the school children studying in these schools,” the bench said.
The court had suo motu registered a PIL on serious inadequacies in the primary education status in the state in 2015. As part of adjudication on the PIL, amicus curiae Prafulla Kumar Rath had submitted a report on February 22, 2023 based on data collected on availability of basic amenities in seven sample primary and upper primary schools in the remote parts of Boudh district.
The bench said the report depicted “a dismal picture of the infrastructure, if it can be called” in primary schools in some where children of Class I to V were sitting in one hall with one teacher allotted for them and in some schools, verandas turned as classroom for the students. In one school, the classroom was also a storeroom for vegetables and grocery to be used for mid-day meals.
The bench also directed the secretary School and Mass Education department to immediately peruse the report which is only a representative sample of seven schools in Boudh and convene a meeting with the collector and DEO and ensure that all funds are immediately released for the repair, upgrade and upkeep of all the seven schools and any other schools which require immediate attention.