"village", we wondered what happened to the residents in the monsoons, for some houses were actually built over the sewers while a channel of dirty water flowed below them. And as we were trying to clear the scenes of that obscenity from our minds, I caught sight of two little girl students of a local school relieving themselves in the open. They were in their uniform so they couldn't have been two urchins who were never taught the rules of propriety and the need of hygiene. Their classmates played close by and some of them would have taken a "bathroom break" sooner or later. Yes, it was a school. A naïve question. Is one allowed to run a school without a bathroom? Schools are being run without libraries. Schools are being run without classrooms, furniture, blackboards. Schools are being run without teachers. Who gives a damn about bathrooms when schools are being run without conscience? The conscience of a nation is dead when two little school-going girls have no option but to sit on a garbage heap close to their playground to pee. The conscience of a nation is dead when the poor are deceived with empty rhetoric of Right to Education. The conscience of a nation is surely dead when, quite literally, the filthy rich businessmen begin running the education show, and that too with only one aim—to find ways to fish for another rich man's fortune through the fishing rod of his child with a bait of "world-class" education.
This is not a one-off incident. Today itself I found two reports in the city edition of The Tribune about abysmal conditions in our schools. One is about a school in another "village" around the city of Chandigarh, where 200 students share one toilet and about four are locked for the use of teachers. Another one is a story about a school in Fatehgarh Sahib where fire-fighting equipments are thought to be as useless as bathrooms in our neighbouring "village".
(Pictures: From the two news reports)
