School hygiene comes out of the closet
Flushed with success, Govt schools clean up their act after Modi’s Clean India clarion call
During his Independence Day address, Prime Minister Narendra Modi outlined his vision of all schools having separate toilets for boys and girls within a year. “Only then our daughters will not be compelled to leave schools midway,” he said from the ramparts of Red Fort. Modi has set a “clean country” deadline to coincide with Mahatma Gandhi’s 150th birth anniversary. Swachh Bharat is a mass mission aimed at building around 800 million toilets and creating modern sewage systems by 2019.
Delhi Government’s Directorate of Education (DoE) has prepared an action plan to ensure functional school toilets since Delhi Government schools already have separate toilets for boys and girls. According to Padmini Singla, Director (Education), Heads of Schools of Government of NCT were instructed to get the necessary repairs and plumbing done in all existing school toilets to make them operational before schools reopened in July after the summer vacation. A corpus of Rs 10 crore has been released in the last three months to repair the unused toilets. Thanks to concerted efforts, 90 per cent toilets are now functional, the rest 10 per cent will be repaired soon, Singla clarified.
No longer citadels of broken bathrooms, dirty toilets as Government schools clean up their act, Singla said even before the Prime Minister’s Clean India clarion call, the Directorate vetted 1,007 schools under the mega cleanliness drive by senior officers in the week preceding the country’s 68th Independence Day. A detailed schedule was chalked out at short notice and teams of carefully selected officers were formed to accomplish the task.
Singla said she visited more than a dozen of schools in far-flung areas of Delhi like Seemapuri, Nand Nagri and Ambedkar Nagar where a majority of the population is from the lower rung of society. During her visit, a principal in Nand Nagri area was served a showcause notice for termination of service since the classrooms in his school did not have operable ceiling fans and tubelights. A principal in Old Seemapuri area too was asked to explain why disciplinary proceedings should not be initiated against him for poor results, choked toilets and a crumbling school edifice. The exercise has had a visible impact, Singla said, as school principals are now pulling their collective weight to set right a skewed infrastructure in their schools. Singla also underscored the need for these field inspections saying they were a valuable insight into the roadmap for Government schools.