Workers retrieve bodies of the school children killed in the fire. File picture

Chennai, Sept. 3: The “avarice and shady dealings” of the management were responsible for the fire at a school in Tamil Nadu that claimed the lives of 94 children in July 2004, the commission that probed the tragedy has said.

“Children unconnected with the school being stacked like sardines with the ulterior purpose of boosting the attendance” was a key factor behind the casualties, the Justice K. Sampath commission has found.

The commission’s report, which was placed in the Tamil Nadu Assembly yesterday, made startling disclosures about the way the Sri Krishna Aided Primary School in Kumbakonam was run like a “personal fief” of its chief manager, Pulavar Palanichamy. It said three schools were run from the same building, violating the education department’s norms and rules.

The school, which had got recognition from the education authorities decades ago, was run from the first floor of the building under a thatched roof instead of the ground floor. Flames from the oven in the midday meal kitchen on the ground floor engulfed the thatch-roofed classrooms on July 16, 2004, the report said.

The school should have been functioning only from the ground floor. But some of the classes were shifted to the first floor to accommodate students of two other schools promoted by the same management. These were the more lucrative nursery-level Saraswathi English Medium School and the Sri Krishna Girls’ High School.

Children from the nursery and the high school were often “herded” into the primary school for “boosting its attendance” so that school inspectors would sanction more government subsidy for the students’ midday meals and grants for more teachers, the inquiry revealed.

Several parents had complained about this and some of the teachers who appeared before the commission also knew why children from the other two schools were shifted to the primary school.

School manager Palanichamy had “absolutely no answer to this state of affairs”.

Justice Sampath said in his report: “The management opened its avaricious mouth too wide. Most of the teachers have spoken of this shift from the other two schools. But according to them (teachers), they were helpless. They had no choice but to obey orders.”

“It was an accident due to the carelessness of the noon meal staff, the callous indifference and criminal insensitivity on the part of the management running the three schools, compounded and abetted by the (state) departments concerned, which failed to implement and enforce the laws and safety standards,” the judge said, summing up the 500-page report.