Patna: To get to the primary school, Lohanipur, East Salam, in this Patna borough, visitors have to walk past human excreta, heaps of plastic bottles and several brass and iron shops that give Lohanipur its name.
Basics elude Bihar schools
Anjali Kumari, 8, sits on a plastic mat that has seen better days, reading out a lesson in Hindi from her book. On the other side of the classroom, a math teacher explains a concept using the blackboard.
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At any point in time, Kumari and the other students in her class share their classroom with at least one other class. The two-room building, where the primary school, Lohanipur, East Salam, is located, is also home to two other schools. Together, the three schools, each running classes I-V, serve 384 children.
“That leaves less than a room for each school,” says Dhananjay Kumar, assistant programme officer in Patna for the government’s flagship programme Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA), launched in 2001 to put every child in school.
Then, there is non-governmental organization Nidaan, which runs classes for out-of-school children in the district and has grabbed the narrow verandah without, according to Kumar, “valid permission”.
This is the story of many government schools in Patna and in other parts of the country. In Patna alone, there are at least a hundred such schools—according to figures available with the Bihar Education Project Council (BEPC)—which survive without buildings to their name, sharing space with the few lucky ones, such as the primary school at Lohanipur, that have a building of their own. Kumar calls this an “urban problem”. The state government, he says, is finding it difficult to find or acquire land on which schools can be built.
BEPC is an autonomous body spearheading the SSA programme in the state.
It is far easier to add rooms to existing buildings, says the council’s director Rajesh Bhushan. The money for the land isn’t the problem, he adds. “It’s now difficult because Patna is already a congested city; funds for this purpose are lying unused.”
Patna was allotted Rs100 crore in 2008-09 under SSA. Only 60% of this was spent. “About 33% of SSA allocation is meant for civil works, but where do we spend?” asks Bhushan. Bihar isn’t the only offender on this count. In 2008-09, Rs20,592.2 crore was supposed to be spent on SSA. Only Rs13,273.4 crore of this money was actually spent.
According to data compiled by the human resource development ministry, Tamil Nadu, Madhya Pradesh and Bihar are large states that do not use enough of the money given to them under SSA. All three states lag Kerala, the leader in terms of literacy rate, with at least nine out of 10 of its residents knowing how to read and write.
Between them, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh have 57 districts (out of a total of 81) where half the people cannot read or write. Tamil Nadu has a literacy rate of 73%.