In a bizarre twist, nearly 600 civic-school students in Govandi skipped classes on Wednesday — to protest for the very classrooms they were promised. Along with their parents, students from Nursery to Std VII staged a day-long demonstration outside the new Mumbai Public School (MPS) Natwar Parekh Compound CBSE building, which remains unopened more than a year after completion.

As mid-day reported earlier, the gleaming new structure stands ready — but unused — because no access road has been built leading up to it. Meanwhile, the students are packed into the MPS Shivajinagar-1 building, where classrooms are so overcrowded that multiple grades share the same room and four children squeeze onto one bench. “We refuse to send our children back until they move us to the new building,” said Badshah Shaikh, head of the Parents Teachers’ Association. “We were promised Govandi’s first CBSE school with modern facilities. Two years later, our kids are still stuck in an old, congested building that houses six other schools.”