LESS SAID ABOUT IT THE BETTER

Osama Manzar
Cow dung mounds, grazing cattle and a bevy of tribal Womenfolk living in the nearby jhuggies who flock around the tube-wells are all that, that a visitor to any of lbs 14 HEC girls/boys high/middle schools. No sooner had he entered the campus, the dilapidated school building depicted a picture of archaeological remains of a building of antiquity. No doors, no win dows that is the condition of most of the HEC school buildings. One wonders as to what will become of the future of those about 4,000 boys and girls studying in them.
Most of the guardians who are class IV employees of the HEC send their wards to the schools just to maintain a social tradition of sorts—-as such about the future of their wards, the guardians appear to be totally devoid of any plan whatsoever. The Mother Nature would decide the course of their destiny, is one age old answer they come up with if you happen to guiz some of the guardians about the future plans they have in their minds for their wards.
The students take the classes sitting on the classroom floor as there are no furniture. No electricity, no toilets such is the plight of the students at tending the HEC schools. Problems faced by the girl students in the absence of toilets can only be imagined. The blackboards are in a worn-out condition that, as one the teacher candidly puts it, can well be compared to the potholed. battered stretch of Ranchi roads. And those black ‘boards are full of obscene graffIti- something like you could see on the walls of any public uninals in the city.
That is not all. As and when tension mounta the town, tile police forces occupy the school’ buildings and so long they continue to stay there it’ is a vacation time for the students and teachers alike.
A classroom and an auditorium of the HEC high school at Sector III are still under the possession of the. police force. It seems as if it has now become their barrack.
One common complaint of the teachers is that the HEC management’ attitude is callous towards the maintenance of the schools.
When contacted, the HEC education officer gave this reporter to Understand that a sum of Rs. 10 lakh has been granted to give a face lift to the schools. But students and teachers of the schools are seeptical about whether the get up of classrooms that look like cow-sheds would ever change.
What they anticipate (right so!) is that there would be some window- dressing in the name of renovations of the buildings and the rest of the sum will be gobbled up by the education department officials. For the sum of Rs. 10 lakh is tool little an amount for giving complete face-lift those dilapidated school buildings, they reason out.