HYDERABAD: Treating the report published in The New Indian Express on November 11, 2022, that 21.2 per cent of schools in the State don’t have proper toilets for girls as suo moto public interest litigation (PIL), the Telangana High Court on Tuesday directed the Chief Secretary, Principal Secretary and Director of School Education to submit their response by the next date of hearing on January 1, 2023.
A division bench of the high court, comprising Chief Justice Ujjal Bhuyan and Justice CV Bhaskar Reddy, said that on the one hand the government says ‘Beti Padhao-Beti Bachao’ and on the other hand, it does not provide minimum facilities for girls in schools.
The New Indian Express had reported that according to the statistics released by the Ministry of Education’s Unified District Information System of Education (UDISE), as many as 8,980 (21.2%) schools across Telangana did not have functional toilets for girls, which was alarming.
Telangana ranked second in the list with four other States — Assam, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, and Odisha — accounting for half of all non-functional toilets for girls in schools across India. This influences the health of nearly 70 lakh girls, and the Right to Education Act of 2009, stipulates that each State government should supply the minimum basic necessities to school-aged children.
During the hearing, A Sanjeev Kumar, a special government pleader, disputed the contents of the newspaper report claiming that the information in the article might be incorrect as he had been dealing with the subject of school education for the last couple of years and was well aware of the subject.
He sought time from the court to file a detailed affidavit in this regard. Later, Justice Bhuyan said: “We are talking about empowering female children... Beti Padhao... Beti Bachao... yet we do not offer washrooms for our female students in schools.”