IS THIS A SCHOOL?

WHY GOVERMENT SCHOOLS ARE SHUTTING DOWN?

This is an image from a school in Madhya Pradesh when I was working on the Animal theme with the children.

What comes to your mind when you hear the word school? A playground, lots of experiences to play and learn.

Just imagine a child thinking that when he was in the second grade, the classroom roof collapsed next to him during the rainy season.

Do children have such experiences? They definitely have.

When you have to urinate or use the toilet in school, you have to go home from school. If you have your periods in school, you have to go back home because such facilities are not available in the school.

If a girl tells you, “I stopped going to school because it lacked bathroom facilities, because the school isn’t in our village, it’s in another village, and we can’t go there,” she says.

Children in government schools have many such experiences.

I started my career working in an NGO, when I went to a government school for the very first time, my reaction was shock, Now i am not talking about academics, I am talking about basic facilities.

I saw a small room whose condition was such that 40% of the room was broken and during the rainy season the condition of the room became worse, a room in which children from class 1 to 5 sit together.

A recent report by NITI Aayog shows that around 94,000 government schools have been closed in the last 10 years.

Why are government schools closing? — Ground Reality

On average, 20–25 government schools are closing every day. To understand the reason, you need to look at the ground, not the paperwork.

1. Lack of Basic Facilities

Broken classrooms, no clean drinking water, no washroom facilities. I’ve personally witnessed this in many schools — an old, ruined room remains, where children urinate because there are no toilets.

I’ve also observed an interesting irony — in many places, new buildings have been constructed next to old schools, but the new ones lack water. The result? The old, ruined school itself has become the washroom. Teachers go to the villagers’ homes and use the washroom.

Some school washrooms are located amidst dense forests and bushes — where there’s a constant fear of being bitten by a snake or scorpion.

2. Administrative and systemic deficiencies

• A severe shortage of teachers
• Lack of teaching and academic training
• A lack of digital training
• Lack of teacher motivation
• A severely imbalanced teacher-student ratio

3. Declining Enrollment

Finally well-off parents send their sons to private schools — daughters are often not sent at all.

On top of that, teachers themselves are often more preoccupied with other tasks than teaching — sometimes government duties, sometimes welcoming political leaders, sometimes BLO duty, sometimes election duty, sometimes census. The question becomes when to teach.

Who suffers? Girl students are deprived of education due to inadequate washrooms and distant schools, and then often married off at a young age.

Can this be considered women’s empowerment? It’s a tragic, ironic, and heartbreaking situation. I personally know some tribal girl child who became mothers at the age of 16. The situation is worse than we imagined.

Marginalized Children, a Broken Support

Children whose parents are laborers, work in factories, or sweat in the village brick kilns — they have only one support: the village government school.

And the question is — what is the condition of this support?