Visakhapatnam: Despite the self-adulation and chest thumping abo-ut the state-of-the-art IITs and IIMs, the ground re-ality of school education is still grim in India, acc-ording to a government educational think tank.
The Unified District Information System for Education report 2014-15, prepared by National University of Educational Planning and Administration, projected a dismal picture of the infrastructure and availability of teachers in many schools of Andhra Pradesh too.
Out of the total 64,161 schools in the state, only a mere 95 schools stood in the first grade when all the facilities were taken into consideration — such as drinking water, playground, library, toilets, pupil-teacher ratio, student-class ratio, etc. While 8,803 schools in the state are managed in suffocated one room buil-dings, a staggering 10,400 schools have only single teacher. Unfortunately, students in 372 schools were forced to study under trees owing to lack of school buildings.
Recently, when HRD minister Ganta Srinivasa Rao visited a school in Anandapuram mandal in Visakhapatnam and found that school still has no toilet facility — which was actually shown to have toilets in the records submitted to the Union government in August - he immediately surrendered the Rajiv Vidya Mission official to the government.
Speaking to Deccan Chronicle, C.V. Renuka, deputy DEO, Visakhapat-nam, said, “We are going to complete teacher rationalisation soon and upgr-ade some schools as mod-el primary schools by me-rging the tottering ones.”
When asked about the toilet facilities in the dist-rict, she explained that they had already completed the construction of to-ilets in most of the schoo-ls. When this correspond-ent visited various schoo-ls in Visakhapatnam dist-rict, though several scho-ols have toilets, many of them lack water facility.
About 600 students of Backward Classes Welfare Hostel in Adivavaram have to go outside to relieve themselves and bathe owing to lack of toilets or bathrooms.
Despite the successive governments pouring in billions into education, the report also underscored lack of regular headmasters in nearly 98 per cent schools and 1,400 schools without a teacher. Unfortunately, 20,000 schools in the state lag in toilet facility.
