Hyderabad: Tribal areas located in or near forests are known to be the hotbed of tropical diseases, especially malaria. However, none of the residential schools for tribal children run by the Telangana government has nurses, leave alone doctors.
There are two types of residential schools run for tribal children, gurukulams and ashrams, but they bear no resemblance to what their names signify. The Telangana Tribal Welfare Residential Educational Institutions Society runs 71 gurukulams while the tribal welfare department runs 269 ashrams, in which 1,11,000 tribal children are admitted.
Not a single one of these schools has a nurse or any medically trained person as they do not have the provisions for this, said an official of the tribal welfare department. The TTWREIS has sanctioned an auxiliary nurse midwife (ANM) each for the 71 gurukulams. Of these, only around 13 have been filled with permanent ANMs, nine have no ANMs, and in the remaining, ANMs work on a contract basis, being paid about Rs 5,000 per month. Tribal student leaders say they do not visit the schools regularly.
Another matter of grave concern is that according to an official from the TTWREIS, “ANMs are doubling as doctors and giving medicines to sick children in gurukulams even though they are not qualified or allowed to do so, but there is no other way as there are no medical experts available in residential schools or even close to many of them.”
Students do not even get purified drinking water. Water purifiers are non-existent in most of the 269 ashrams, said a tribal department official. Only three or four gurukulams have them.
Sanitary pad incinerators are missing in almost all the gurukulams and ashrams for girls even though education minister Kadiam Srihari had said last year that these would be installed in all government girls' schools.
Another TTWREIS official said, “We have written umpteen number of times to the state government in the past one year, asking for RO purifiers, incinerators, green boards and computers, but to no avail. We even gave a proposal for around Rs 150 crore for procurement of the infrastructure for 71 gurukulams. Recently, a proposal for around Rs 28 crore was sent again for the schools which had sent us their demands.”
