Kejriwal: Others just talk, AAP building modern schools in Delhi

Delhi education minister Atishi, who was also present at the inauguration, compared the new building with old photographs of the school

Chief minister Arvind Kejriwal on Monday inaugurated a new school building at the Government Girls’ Senior Secondary School (No. 2) in west Delhi’s Uttam Nagar, officials said. Officials said the school was built in 1985, but construction of a pucca building was sanctioned in January 2021 by the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP)-led government.

Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal inaugurates the building of a government school in at Uttam Nagar. (ANI)

Speaking at the inauguration, the chief minister said that since 1985, both the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Congress governed the state, but education was not on their agenda. “As a result, a permanent school building was never constructed here. Our politics is entirely based on providing quality education to every child, which is why the AAP government is dedicated to constructing such brilliant schools,” Kejriwal said on Monday.

Officials said the new building has 41 classrooms with a capacity to accommodate 1,600 students. It also has 12 laboratories, two libraries, office and staff rooms, a multi-purpose auditorium, a lift and activity rooms including those for children with special needs.

Pointing out that this was not a “one-off example”, Kejriwal said all government schools were being provided with the best facilities out there, which in turn was encouraging parents to send their children to a government school.

“We recently were given the charge of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD). There are around 1,800 schools under the MCD, and we need to immediately start fixing them. It will take time, but I assure you that we will fix them. In five years, we managed to fix all the government schools in Delhi, and in another five to seven years we will fix the MCD schools too,” Kejriwal added.

AAP won the MCD elections in December last year, with the MCD previously being under the BJP for 15 years.

Delhi education minister Atishi, who was also present at the inauguration, compared the new building with old photographs of the school.

“The classrooms had tin ceilings that would leak during the monsoon season and cause inconvenience to the students. This was not just the condition of this school, but thousands of classrooms and other school buildings across Delhi were in the same dilapidated state in 2015,” Atishi said, adding that if the CM had not shown the “courage” to allocate 25% of Delhi’s budget to education, the children of Delhi would not have had such government schools today.

Meanwhile, Delhi BJP spokesperson Praveen Shankar Kapoor hit back at Kejriwal.

“In 2015, Delhi had 1046 government schools and eight years later, the number has not changed under the Kejriwal government. All they have done is construct some new buildings or added new classrooms. And these are already under the Lokpal and vigilance department’s scanner due to complaints of embezzlement of construction funds,” said Kapoor.

He also said that between 1993 and 1998, when BJP was in power in Delhi, around 60 new government schools in the Capital were added while 100 more were reconstructed or renovated.