Telangana: Students pay for neglect of hostels with their lives
HYDERABAD: The untimely deaths of half-a-dozen students of State-run hostels and a series of food poisoning incidents that affected hundreds of others in recent times has undermined the very objective of the government to provide better educational facilities to the poor and marginalised sections while underlining the alarming situation.
State-run hostels are plagued with a slew of issues ranging from sanitation, unhygienic food and water, and rampant seasonal and vector-borne diseases. The situation of hostels being run in private buildings is worse as there are insufficient classrooms, dormitories, dining halls and washrooms. It is no exaggeration to say that in some of these hostels being run in private buildings, classrooms and dormitories are the same. In Khammam, 27 out of 30 hostels are run in private buildings.
Sources say that ANMs or nursing staff at the hostels are bereft of life-saving medication. “In most cases, all they have is Paracetamol,” a student lamented. Of the six students, four died of ill health in the span of just one month (August) in hostels located in the erstwhile Adilabad district alone.
Apart from these six students, a 10-year-old student of BC welfare residential hostel at Birkur of erstwhile Nizamabad district died on Saturday, allegedly of snakebite. This was the second such incident during this year, the first claiming the life of a 13-year-old eighth standard student in another BC welfare residential hostel at Bogaram on the outskirts of Hyderabad last March.
Last week, a 13-year-old student of Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalaya (KGBV) died, allegedly of food poisoning, in Kagaznagar of Komaram Bheem-Asifabad district. Incidentally, KGBV hostels are facing an acute funds crunch, caught in the stand-off between the State and Union governments.The State government accuses the Centre of not releasing monetary grants for close to six months now.
At a medical camp conducted in the premises of the government SC Integrated Welfare Hostel for boys in Karimnagar city on Saturday, as many as 27 of the 45 students screened were suffering from fever, headache, nausea or flu. “Two of these boys were shifted to government hospitals as they needed hospitalisation,” said medical officer Dr Ayesha Begum.
When Express visited a few hostels, it was clear that the welfare hostels lack basic amenities such as access to safe drinking water and food. The students informed that they have been served rice riddled with insects. It was observed that there are no quality checks on the food supplies. The hostels are accepting the stocks provided by the mess contractors without objection or checks which are served to the students without a thought about the growing number of food poisoning cases.
“The mess contractor has been supplying damaged and bug-infested vegetables every day to the hostel. Rainwater is entering the overhead tank and getting mixed with drinking water,” informed a cook of Telangana Social Welfare Residential School and College at Ghanpur. Food contractors in private try to justify their actions saying that the government has not revised the rates in line with the inflation, forcing them to supply substandard items.
When asked about the likely cause of food poisoning, the principal of a residential school in Karimnagar district said that sometimes, the utensils are not washed with detergent. There is no monitoring of the cleaning staff, he said.
(With inputs from Adilabad, Nizamabad, Karimnagar, Khammam, Medak and Warangal)