JAIPUR: Teachers and students at Govt Varishtha Upadhyay Sanskrit School in Nangal Bela village near Jaipur were greeted by chunks of fallen roof plaster scattered across a classroom floor when they opened it Tuesday morning. The ceiling had multiple patches of exposed and damaged plaster.“It is fortunate that the school was closed at the time, so no one was injured,” Moolchand Meena, the school principal, said. The incident occurred in one of the four functional classrooms in the govt school.Officials from Samagra Shiksha, the education department’s wing that handles repairs and renovations of buildings, inspected the school Wednesday and prepared an estimate for reconstruction of the damaged roof. “Repair and maintenance work will be carried out by Samagra Shiksha,” said Priyanka Jodhawat, commissioner, department of Sanskrit education.The village’s only school has around 280 students from Classes 1 to 12 and nine classrooms, of which five are in a dilapidated condition and remain locked. The remaining four rooms are used for some classes, while other classes are held in the veranda, under trees and in the library.“There is no proper arrangement to seat all 280 children. We try to manage and make them sit outside classrooms, but there are not enough trees either in the school,” Meena said.The school also uses another building about 200-250 metres away to conduct primary classes. With only nine teachers on the rolls, movement between the two buildings is difficult. Several posts are vacant, including mathematics and science teachers, and the school faces a shortage of Class IV employees also.Meena said the five dilapidated rooms are around 70-75 years old. “Nothing like this happened in the last 25-26 years, so nobody expected the plaster to fall this way. An order has now been issued for demolition of the five dilapidated rooms, which is scheduled for Oct 14,” the principal said.“This year, the govt school experienced an increase in enrolment, adding 110 students, thanks to the outstanding academic performance. This surge in enrolment led to the closure of a private school in the village in July,” Meena claimed.
