Calcutta, Sept. 14: The gov-ernment has compiled details of infrastructure in all the 12,000 state-aided secondary and higher secondary schools in a bid to speed up decisions on their upgrade.

From the size of the campus to seating arrangements in classrooms, the database has almost every detail. The state of the laboratories and libraries, sports facilities and student-teacher ratio are also there.

“This is the first time the government has collected information related to school infrastructure in such detail,” said Sukumar Mahapatra, a senior official of the school education department.

The information will also help the government monitor the schools’ requirements.

“If a school wants to introduce the science stream at the plus II level, we can determine the number of additional teachers required by referring to the data,” an official said.

“In the absence of the data, it took us a long time to verify the schools’ requirements when they approached us with expansion proposals,” he added.

Earlier, the government referred such proposals to the district inspectors of schools for a preliminary scan of the infrastructure. After the inspectors submitted their reports, the education department carried out a second round of inspection. “In the new system, we can cut short the time spent on completing this pro- cess,” the official said.