Srinagar, July 05 (KNO) : Puncturing the tall claims of the successive regimes to fill in the infrastructural gaps in the government schools, more than 40 percent school buildings in J&K are in semi-dilapidated conditions taking a serious toll on the quality education.
As per the official figures available with Kashmir News Observer (KNO), the school buildings are in a dilapidated condition while as most of the students don’t have proper seating arrangements in their respective schools.
As per the figures, there are around 16 lakh students in J&K schools out of which more than seven lakh students sit on floor to take their classes. As per the figures, the department has acknowledged that students, at times, take their classes in the open due to lack of proper school buildings.
The students are deprived of proper classrooms and buildings at a time when the government of India is pumping in huge amount of money annually for up gradation of infrastructure and annual grants for maintenance of the schools buildings. “But the whole money goes down the drain with no supervision from the higher ups in the department,” an official told KNO.
The official said the government of India has stopped giving new buildings to the state government given its poor performance to complete the previous buildings which were approved by Ministry of human resource Development (MHRD) during the past many years.
“The school buildings approved in 2008 or 2010 are yet to be completed and the students continue to take their classes from old structures which are in shabby conditions,” the official told KNO.
The official said various meetings were convened to complete the pending school buildings in J&K state but the department didn’t succeed in completing these incomplete structures for unknown reasons. “In most of the cases, the buildings remained incomplete due to cost escalation and the execution of work was halted due to dearth of funds,” the official told KNO.
Besides proper classrooms, the students in government schools are deprived of basic facilities like playground and other amenities. The facilities are missing in schools despite having availability of funds in school heads and zonal heads.
Director School Education Kashmir (DSEK) Muhammad Younis Malik when contacted told KNO that the department has started an exercise to plug in all infrastructural gaps in government schools and everything will set in place in phased manner. “We are aware of weakness and infrastructural gaps but department is at it because our aim is to provide every facility to our students,” he said.(KNO)