Fifteen years ago, I moved to the government school system from teaching English in one of Delhi's leading, private trust-run schools. Looking back, despite some changes, the government school context remains largely uninspiring, except for the children who bring to the job the excitement of discovery and the moments of joy in learning. Even discounting the obvious differences that are bound to exist between the relatively affluent school I was affiliated to, and the government school in a resettlement colony, the state of infrastructure was appalling. In the latter, two toilets, defective and without running water, were meant to serve the needs of 1500 girls between the ages of 10 to 18, at least a fourth of whom would be menstruating on any given day. On most days, the drinking water taps would remain dry, there was no electricity to power fans or lights and students were crammed into makeshift classrooms in corridors and verandas.
Today, thanks to the efforts of parent bodies, NGOs, legal campaigns and a growing awareness of these issues, facilities have improved in a very basic sense in government schools all over. But much more remains to be done. Overcrowding remains a reality, and leads to many kinds of tragedies, the most serious of which is the proclivity towards stampedes. The most recent example was the September 2009 stampede in a government school in a poorer locality of east Delhi, in which five girl students were killed and 27 injured in a melee following rumours of a short circuit after heavy rains.
It is not surprising that the term 'government school' brings to mind the image of a dilapidated structure with a ragged bunch of children, and uninterested teachers lazily sitting around, if they are at all present. But the 30,000 teachers and one million children in the 927 government schools in Delhi present a more complex reality. Even though the schools are centrally administered and managed by the Directorate of Education the infrastructure of the schools vary in different parts of the national capital region. There are glaring differences, on the one hand, between the facilities in schools serving students from the marginal sections, the lower classes, castes and minority religions; and, on the other, schools for children of daily wagers and those located in middle-class residential areas.
Of the three kinds of schools under the Directorate of Education, at the top are the 19 prestigious English-medium Rajkiya Pratibha Vikas Vidyalayas. In between are the Sarvodaya schools with one English medium section, many of them running a morning shift for girls and an afternoon shift for boys. Then there are the general government schools, also often running in two shifts. These last cannot refuse admission to any child residing within the locality.