No toilet or playground, a single room for 5 classes: What ails primary school in Dadri

After eight-year-old Deeksha leaves for school around 8 am, her mother stays back in their rented room until her classes end at 2 pm. The reason: the Class IV student may have to rush home at any point to use the washroom. Deeksha’s school, Prathmik Vidyalaya in Dadri tehsil’s Gadhi village, does not have a […]

60 students from classes 1-5 study in the single-room school in Dadri tehsil’s Gadhi village. (Express photo by Gajendra Yadav)

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After eight-year-old Deeksha leaves for school around 8 am, her mother stays back in their rented room until her classes end at 2 pm. The reason: the Class IV student may have to rush home at any point to use the washroom.

Deeksha’s school, Prathmik Vidyalaya in Dadri tehsil’s Gadhi village, does not have a single toilet — neither for its 60 students nor its four teachers, all women.

While students go home if they need to use the toilet, the teachers depend on residents. “It will be three years in October 2023 since the school was built, but we still don’t have a toilet. We have written multiple times to different authorities and raised the matter with the local MLA too, but nobody listens. The neighbours are generous enough to let us use their toilet. We feel very embarrassed, but we are helpless,” said a teacher, who has been teaching at the school since 2009, requesting anonymity.

The lack of sanitation facilities is not the only thing plaguing the primary school in Gautam Budh Nagar district. The school is one single room which doubles up as a classroom for children from classes 1-5. It has no boundary wall or playground. A steel almirah in a corner, containing a few books, is the ‘library’. It shares space with unused sports items since there is no space for students to play. Mid-day meal utensils lie on a small corner shelf.

Jahnvi, a Class V student, said that apart from the lack of a toilet, there is hardly any space for them to sit. “I frequently go home as there is no toilet here. Sometimes, my mother and teachers suspect that I’m using it as an excuse to avoid studying. But that is not the case. There is a space crunch in class — four-five students have to sit on a bench meant for three,” said the girl.

“I love to play games, but there is no playground here. The concrete space in front of the school is not vacant most of the time,” she added.

“We have to spread mattresses to accommodate students owing to fewer desks,” said another teacher.

60 students from classes 1-5 study in the single-room school in Dadri tehsil’s Gadhi village. (Express photo by Gajendra Yadav)

Parents, meanwhile, are helpless. Shiwani (35), who hails from Etah and lives on rent in Gadhi village, wants to send her children to a better school. “But a good education is still a dream for us. My husband is a labourer and we barely manage to meet our daily needs. People like us do not have options,” she said.

Mamata Devi, who has been living in the village on rent for the last 12 years, said she was forced to pull her two daughters out from a private school that charged a monthly fee of Rs 300: “I fell ill and a lot of money was spent on my treatment. My husband works in a kirana store. If I had money, I would have never sent my children here.”

Devi feels that the school’s sorry state is on account of workers residing in the village: “The administration doesn’t consider us human or they would have provided the school with at least one toilet,” she added.

Asked why the school has no toilets, the district’s Basic Shiksha Adhikari (BSA), Aishwarya Laxmi, said, “Only a very small portion of land was available for the school, therefore, only a single room was constructed.” Laxmi did not comment on whether the toilet would be built.