Makeshift schools in Paradip. Telegraph pictures

Paradip, Feb. 16: After every few days, slum children in parts of Paradip port town find that their school’s address has changed.

There are several government-run primary schools in the slums here, but with no buildings to call their own, these schools keep moving from one location to another. Children from economically weaker backgrounds find that their schools are being relocated every few days. Rented houses, temples and polythene-covered sheds — schoolchildren have sat for classes in all.

District project coordinator of Sarva Sikshya Abhiyan Nirmal Kumar Das said there were 14 government-run primary schools that fell under the jurisdiction of Paradip Municipality. While eight of them located within the planned civil township had permanent buildings, the rest of such schools in slum settlements did not. “This is because there is no land for building the school. The department is ready with funds. But the funds are lying unused,” Das said.

Gholapada project primary school in Balijhar slum settlement is a case in point. Sometime back, it was operating from a rented house. Then the house owner asked that the premises be vacated. It was shifted to the premises of a Hindu temple nearby. Sometime back, it was again relocated to another spot after the priest objected to the running of the school inside the temple. The school is now functioning from a makeshift polythene-covered shed.

Though funds are available under the Reconstruction of School Buildings Programme, the state school and mass education department has been unable to build school buildings as the Paradip Port Trust has failed to provide the required land. As a result, education has taken a backseat for over a thousand children from a cluster of slum colonies.

Sarat Marandi, a daily wage earner who lives in Beer Factory Slum Colony, and his wife both leave for work in the morning. “I send my two children to school. I do not want them to be illiterate. But classes are not held regularly in the colony school. I am not in a position to afford better schools,” said Marandi.

One of the problems is that these government-run schools have come up on unauthorised and encroached land.

“We are not against opening of schools by the state government. But they should be set up on litigation-free land. The slum colonies where the schools are in operation are all unauthorised settlements. The Paradip Port Trust plans to evict the unlawful settlers from the port land. Under the major ports acts, no plots can be allocated to the state government for school buildings on encroached land,” said Paradip Port Trust chairman G. Jagannath Rao.