Jaipur: Where is the breathing space in our schools?

Games are vital for the mental and physical development of children and the Right to Education Act also provides for playground in every school. However, if we talk of government schools in Jaipur district, 55 per cent of these educational institutions do not have a playground. To the worse, a lot of the state-run schools have only one or two rooms.

 The Rajasthan Elementary Education Council report for 2012-13 reveals that there is no playground for students in 60 per cent of the government schools in rural and urban areas.

There are a total of 45,415 schools that lack a playground. Furthermore, there are 30,540 schools where the headmaster has no room.  It is not less than a mocking situation that in Jaipur where there are as many as 19 MLAs, two MPs and state’s education minister and other top bureaucrats of the education department sit here has government schools where there is no playground.

There are only 2,010 schools out of the total 4,529 elementary schools in the Jaipur district which have a playground. Similarly, there are 1,529 schools which lack a separate room for school headmaster.

Risky classrooms
There are 22,589 govt school classrooms in state which are identified as risky and students are forced to study in these schools as they do not have other options. These classrooms need major repair and are identified and listed for repairs every year but only a few of these are repaired. In 2008-09 there were 28,575 classrooms that needed major repair.