The Orissa High Court on Tuesday, February 28, directed School and Mass Education Secretary Aswathy S to draw up a detailed action plan to ensure basic facilities such as classrooms, benches and desks, potable water, toilets, electricity and so on in primary schools in Odisha. Further, the court expected Aswathy to personally undertake the exercise by first calling for a report from each of the district education officers (DEOs) on the actual condition of the primary and upper primary schools indicating the availability of all basic facilities, stated a report by The New Indian Express.
The division bench comprising Chief Justice S Muralidhar and Justice MS Raman said that 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 a war footing, it added.
Further, 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.
Additionally, the court had suo motu registered a PIL on serious inadequacies in the primary education status in the state in 2015. According to part of adjudication on the PIL, amicus curiae Prafulla Kumar Rath submitted a report on February 22, 2023, based on data collected on the availability of basic amenities in seven sample primary and upper primary schools in the remote parts of Boudh district.
And the bench said the report depicted a dismal picture of the infrastructure, if it can be called so, as in a few primary schools children of Class I to V were sitting in one hall with one teacher allotted to them and in some other schools, verandas turned into classrooms for students. Also, in one school, the classroom was also a storeroom for vegetables and groceries to be used for midday 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, stated a report by The New Indian Express.
