The students are seen sitting on the floor as the classroom is completely bare with no chair or desk.
Several students are seen huddled under umbrellas inside a classroom to protect themselves from rainwater leaking through the damaged roof, in a set of videos that narrate the sorry state of government school buildings in Madhya Pradesh. The students are seen sitting on the floor as the classroom is completely bare with no chair or desk.
Dilapidated (buildings), dirty (toilets), insufficient (number of teaching staff) are the adjectives that describe several government schools in the state ruled by the BJP. The condition worsens during the monsoon season when rainwater floods the classrooms and animals, in search for shelter, get inside the school premises.
In the government school in Khairi Kalan in Seoni district, not only roofs, even the walls of the classroom are damaged. Parents said many students do not attend classes because the school roof leaks during the rainy season.
"Few days ago, plaster of one of the walls fell on the floor and one of the students had a close shave," school principal Mahendra Sharma told NDTV.
In tribal-dominated Dindori district, plastic sheets to protect from rain cover the roof of Gopalpur Higher secondary school. Here, around 400 students are forced to sit inside unsafe buildings with cracked walls as there is no other higher secondary school nearby.
Even schools in state capital Bhopal are in a pathetic state. Students of Classes 1 to 5 of a government primary School in Roshanpura are crammed in one room as the school does not have enough classrooms to accommodate 103 students. The school has only two teachers for these classes.
Shabnam Khan, one of the teachers, said, "This is a community hall, all five classes are held here."
The school, which is in the midst of the posh Shahpura area, has its students sit amid damp walls. The toilet in the school is dirty, the teachers are also troubled by the mischievous locals who routinely trespass. The principal in-charge Madhumati Bhavalkar said, "There is no watchman, no peon, sometimes the locks are broken by the locals. The toilets are dirty, so we don't use them."
NDTV tried contacting the school education minister Inder Singh Parmar but didn't get a response.
Rickety buildings is not the only problem, there are 21,077 schools in the state which have only one teacher each. 93 percent of these 21,077 schools are in rural areas.
Madhya Pradesh ranked fifth in the national educational achievements of elementary classes in the National Achievement Survey (NAS), but it was also pointed out that only 27 per cent of students of Class 10 in the state are able to derive formulae, equations and laws in science.