None of the 36,000 odd Government schools in Jharkhand will get lightning conductors as the Accountant General (AG) in his report has specified that single storey buildings are not entitled for installation of the devices, State School Education and Literacy Secretary Amrendra Pratap Singh said on Thursday.
The department’s stand, however, is not in consonance with the demands of the various parents’ associations, which have expressed concern over the safety of school-going children in a state where lighting kills at least 200 people every year.
Singh, who has addressed letters to all the District Superintendents of Education (DSE) and District Education Officers (DEO) highlighting a paragraph on lightning conductors from the AG’s report, said that the department will not make any investment that is not in accordance with the “rule book”.
“The AG’s report clearly says that lightning conductors shall not be installed in single storey buildings. It further says that lightning conductors can be installed in double storey or triple storey buildings only if the superintending engineer recommends the same in writing and specifies a concrete reason for it,” said Singh, adding that there was provision to install lightning conductors in special cases. Most of the schools in Jharkhand run in single storey buildings, while some; especially the ones in urban areas, have double storey buildings, he said.
Taking suo moto cognizance of deaths caused by lightning, the Jharkhand High Court in 2007 had directed the Government to install lightning conductors in every school and important government buildings.
Later in 2016, the State Disaster Management Authority (SDMA) directed that all government schools in Jharkhand should have lightning conductors. And the school education department had complied with the direction. However, lightning conductors started disappearing from schools and school authorities said that they were stolen. At present, there is no data on the number of schools that have lightning conductors.
According to SDMA, around 1,800 people have been killed by lightning in the last 12 years in Jharkhand. The SDMA data says that lightning kills a person every second day on an average in a year. Experts, however, say the numbers are much higher as several deaths in state’s remote areas go unreported.
“Lightning claimed around 228 lives in Jharkhand in 2016 and 240 in 2017. We can say that lightning kills around 250-300 people in Jharkhand every year,” said Colonel Sanjay Srivastava, former project officer of SDMA.
Lightning conductors are rods made of 90 per cent copper and some amount of aluminum.
These rods act as insulators and prevent the flow of current into the building in case lightning strikes.