A class being held beneath a staircase at the building in Rajendra Nagar. Picture by Ranjeet Kumar Dey

Patna, Nov. 9: Chief minister Nitish Kumar needn’t look too far to find out what ails education in the state he runs.

A government school building in the heart of the capital is home to four schools which impart education to children from 10 rooms. Even landings and verandas are used by the teachers to take classes.

The building, situated adjacent to Ganga Devi College at Rajendra Nagar, houses four schools — Madhya Vidhyalaya, Kanya Madhya Vidhyalaya Bir Chand Patel, Navin Adarsh Madhya Vidhyalaya and Bharti Madhya Vidhyalaya Lohia Nagar.

All these schools run from Class I to VIII with a combined student strength of around 2,500. While Bharti Madhya Vidhyalaya runs in the morning shift, from 7am to 11.30am, the three other schools run from 12noon to 4pm.

Madhya Vidhyalaya principal Sashiprabha Trivedi said the biggest problem is insufficient number of classrooms and lack of civic amenities. “Space is the biggest problem for the school management. We have no choice but to take classes in the open ground, on the veranda or below the staircase,” he said.

The three schools have been given three classrooms each. Each school has converted one from their quota of three into an office-cum-store room. The school management has to accommodate around 1,500 students of three schools in the remaining seven classrooms.

The children have no other option but to sit on broken benches and study from broken blackboards.

Owing to insufficient number of toilets, students, both boys and girls, are forced to go into the open or use toilets of the nearby Ganga Devi College. The school has a toilet but it is dirty and seldom, if ever, cleaned.

Tanisha, a student of Madhya Vidhyalaya, said: “Generally we prefer to go to toilets at homes or the nearby college or the high school which is located within our campus.”

“As our schools were opened under the Sarv Sikhsa Abhiyan, we don’t get any financial support from the state government for carrying out extension work or even construction of classrooms,” Trivedi said.

Most of the students studying in these schools come from the lower classes or middle income groups. Mohan Prasad, a schoolteacher at Madhya Vidhyalaya, said: “Apart from lack of space and civic amenities, the other problem for us is retention of students.”

Many parents shift their children to other government schools having better facilities or to private institutions which charge nominal fees.

Speaking under cover of anonymity, a teacher of one of the schools said: “While on the one hand the government is keen on enforcing the Right to Education, which would compel private schools to upgrade their infrastructure, on the other, government schools don’t have any infrastructure. In such a situation, it’s natural that parents would prefer private schools to government ones.”

Rajesh Bhushan, the state project director of Bihar Education Project Council, said: “On the basis of information provided by you, I will direct the officials concerned to look into the matter.”