Civic body to get tough on errant schools

For all those schools that turned a deaf ear to parents' complaints about infrastructure and teaching deficiencies, there's some news. The Pune Municipal Corporation's education department has started their annual survey of cracking down on all schools ufffd civic and private ufffd to check infrastructure, teachers' training, latest syllabus as well as complaints about fee hikes.

Shubhangi Chavan, assistant education officer, PMC said that the exercise would help to take action against errant schools that do not provide adequate facilities to students. "We have a set format to evaluate the schools. This year there are a few changes like no unit tests for students because of the Right to Education Act. Besides checking if curriculum pattern is being followed properly, we also check if students are being taught properly by taking some random tests in classes and also evaluating how often teachers have been given training," she said.

Chavan added that an important aspect of the inspection was to check infrastructure facilities at schools like adequate and clean toilets, playgrounds, state of classrooms and benches. "We want to ensure that not only are schools well maintained but also that students are safe in the institution. So no rickety benches or broken walls are tolerated," said Chavan. She also added that if parents have any information about certain problems in schools that they would like to highlight, they could bring it to the PMC's notice.

"The survey will go on until mid-March," said Ramchandra Jadhav, PMC's education officer.If a school were found lacking in any of these facilities, they would be issued a notice to get these things repaired within a specific time period. If they don't do it within that time period, then the civic body moves in for punitive action including fines or cancellation of permissions.