Delhi schools are hotbeds of injustice

Even after paying Rs 2 lakh to Delhi Jal Board, a government school in east Delhi's Trilokpuri still could not procure drinking water for its students during last year’s winters.

Updated on: Apr 18, 2011, 23:23:58 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Even after paying Rs 2 lakh to Delhi Jal Board, a government school in east Delhi's Trilokpuri still could not procure drinking water for its students during last year’s winters.

And this is one of the revelations that a series of Right to Information (RTI) applications expose. These applications were filed in several government schools in east Delhi to gauge the efficacy of the Right to Education (RTE) law and corruption in education.

“The students of the Trilokpuri school will repeat their testimony in front of senior Delhi government officials on Wednesday,” said an official of the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR). The organisation is conducting a public hearing into the nearly 800 complaints filed over the shoddy implementation of RTE in the Capital.

The NCPCR is the nodal authority under the law to monitor its implementation and is holding its first such public consultation with the NGO Joint Operation for Social Help (JOSH).

Another victim of the corrupt education system is a Muslim woman in east Delhi (name withheld to protect the identity of the child). She had to pay a bribe of R500 to get a R1,000 scholarship meant for children from the minority community even though she was supposed to get R2,000 as she had two children studying in the school.

In another case, a student was badly injured after he had a fall in his classroom. The school, instead of arranging for immediate medical attention, kept him in the school and sent two other students to inform his grandmother. The child’s hand has suffered permanent damage due to the delay in receiving medical attention.

Amit (name changed), a class 7 student in the government school in Trilokpuri, had complained to his class teacher about some of his classmates smoking in the class. The teacher instead slapped him, which injured his ear.

The NCPCR has now summoned senior officials from the Delhi government and the MCD to provide instant justice to complainants.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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