Indian Express: Pune: Tuesday,
May 14, 2013.
THE Bombay
High Court has directed the Maharashtra government to file an affidavit in
connection with the death of 192 students in ashram shalas (residential
schools) in the state in a period of over 10 years. The court also asked the
government to take adequate measures to prevent such incidents.
The HC
directives came during hearing of a PIL was filed by activist Ravindra Talpe
and advocate Uday Varunjikar of Samaj Kruti Samiti. A bench of Justice P V
Hardas and Justice Mridula Bhatkar also directed the state government to
respond to the issues raised by the complainants. Talpe obtained the
information through an RTI application.
According to
the reply there are 547 residential schools run by the government where
1,87,216 student stay. There are also an additional 556 government aided
residential schools where 82,750 students study. Between 2001 and 2012, 50
students died in these schools in Nashik Division, 89 students in the Kalwan
Division and 29 in Rajur-Ahmednagar Division. “There are 1,100 ashram shalas in
the state. The figures are only from 150-200 schools which means the figure
could be much higher than estimated,” Talpe said.
The reasons
cited for the deaths were more shocking for Taple. “In some cases, sudden death
has been mentioned. In other cases, fever, suicides, accidents and snake bites
have been cited. This clearly means that the students were not taken care of.
There seem to be gross negligence in the functioning of the ashram shalas. The
causes of death and the action taken in the matter reflects the lack of
seriousness on the government’s part. Action has been taken against seven
people only over the years,” he said.
“The ‘ashram
shalas’ are especially set up by the state government in remote areas where
people are poor and do not have easy access to education,” he said.
Through RTI,
the activist had sought information regarding the students who died including
their name, age, the class in which the student was studying, name of the
residential school, reason or reasons of death, date of death, if action has
been taken against the delinquent employee and if the family was compensated.
In most
cases, the family has not been compensated yet. “Only Rs 13 lakh has been paid
to relatives of 68 children,” Taple said.
He said they
decided to pursue that case when deaths due to snake bite in Gondia and
Gadchiroli were registered in October-November last year but no police action
was taken.
“In December
2012, four more kids died in the Junnar taluka of Pune district. This was
alarming, so I filed an RTI asking for information about deaths of students in
all the 29 project offices in the state. However, we were provided with
information by only five tribal project officers,” he said. Information
provided by the five tribal project offices was shocking. “As many as 192
students died in the jurisdiction of only those five offices in ten years. If
we were given information about all 29 regions the number would surely be in
thousands,” he said.
After
obtaining the information, he approached the Tribal Commissioner, the Tribal
Development Minister, National Human Rights Commissioner, Chief Minister and
the Governor of Maharashtra but no action was taken. “Because of this apathy I
was forced to move the HC. We hope the tribal kids and their families will get
justice,” he added.
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