JAIPUR: Sanganer is Chief Minister Bhajan Lal Sharma’s constituency. A visit to five govt schools here found crumbling walls, absent water and unresolved complaints stretching back years – and, in the words of the staff who work there every day, what it is actually like to spend a full school day in a building with no functional toilet.“I’ve trained myself to drink less water”At Bhojyawas Govt Primary School, toilets have no water supply at all – weeds have grown around the block, and a cracked, cobwebbed water tank stands unused beside it. The school shares its building with a sub-health centre, where fungus now covers stored medicine boxes and water stains mark chairs and registers. For women working on campus, relieving themselves has become something to plan the whole day around.One staff member said going out into the open has become routine for her – she has made a habit of drinking less water through the day and consciously holding off the urge to use a toilet, simply because there is no functioning one to use. The school itself has just 10 students, Classes 1 to 5, under a single teacher. One room has been locked shut altogether because of dampness, its walls cracked and corners crumbling. Staff say they submit written complaints about the building’s condition every year. But little changes.Three latches on every doorGovt Secondary School, Kalyanpura, looks well-kept from the gate – until you learn that one of its two buildings has been shut as unsafe, leaving 404 students across Classes 1-12 to squeeze into just four of six rooms. The school runs two shifts, 7 am-12 noon and 12:30-6 pm, and second-shift students sit under a tin shed outside, exposed to sun and rain. Washrooms have no regular water supply and are cleaned only twice a month, said Deepak (name changed), a Class 12 student. Divya (name changed), also in Class 12, said girls sometimes have to hold themselves back through the school day for want of usable toilets. Preeti (name changed), a classmate, said the dampness and falling plaster in her classroom leave her struggling to breathe some days.With no security guard and a broken, low boundary wall, the campus has seen repeated theft – the principal said multiple padlocks are now standard on every classroom door because of break-ins, including, he believes, by people suspected of drug use. The unusual sight that greets a visitor first: three latches and three separate locks on ordinary classroom doors, a small but visible measure of how unsafe the campus has come to feel after dark.Combined classes, tanker water, no fenceAt the Govt Upper Primary Sanskrit School in Hasampur Basdi, 85 students spanning Classes 1 to 8 are taught in just four classrooms – one of which is given over to Booth Level Officer election-duty work on any given day, shrinking the usable space further. With only three teachers present on the day of the visit, Classes 6, 7 and 8 were being taught together as one group. Teacher Rajendra Verma produced, for the record, the letters he has submitted seeking a playground, boundary fencing and a tubewell.The school has run on tanker water for close to a year now, he said, with neither a reliable drinking-water supply nor a working tap connection. Toilets are cleaned only once a month. Because there is no fencing around the grounds, staff say outsiders use the open school compound in the evenings to drink – a security concern for a campus that also has no guard.A school that simply wasn’t open At Govt Primary School in Hasampura, there was no need to interview anyone about neglect – the gate was locked at 9.30am on an ordinary school day. A resident living nearby said the school stays shut “nearly half the time.” Former ward councillor Ramsingh Choudhary said he has been writing to govt for three years about the school’s lack of facilities, without result.Growing on paper, not in bricks Sumer Singh Senior Secondary School, Sumer Nagar, was upgraded to senior-secondary status only last year – a promotion in name that never came with a matching expansion in classrooms. Around 300 students now share eight rooms in a school that needs three or four more; classes are routinely combined, and many students sit on the floor because the rooms are too small to fit benches for everyone. Faulty drainage in the bathrooms has caused seepage and dampness to spread through the building. The principal said three separate letters were sent to the authorities last year. The problem remains exactly as it was.Across all five schools, the pattern repeats with almost mechanical consistency: too few classrooms, toilets cleaned once or twice a month at best, drinking water dependent on tankers rather than pipelines, boundary walls too broken to keep out intruders, and – in every single case – a paper trail of written requests to the local administration that have gone unanswered for a year or more. It is chief minister’s constituency. It is also, on the evidence of a single afternoon’s visit, indistinguishable from the neglect found everywhere else in the state.
