Rs 50-cr facelift for BMC schools
To begin with, 34 of the 87 dilapidated institutions will be renovated, complete with swank classrooms and labs
Shalini Nair & Anahita Mukherji
The nondescript municipal school building in your neighbourhood, notorious for its high dropout rate and low teaching standards, is all set to get a facelift.
The unmistakable features of Mumbai’s municipal schools—derelict buildings, barren playgrounds, drab classrooms—may soon give way to architecture more conducive to a child’s learning, going by the plan at hand. To begin with, 34 of the 87 dilapidated schools will be completely renovated at a cost of Rs 49.5 crore this year.
Civic officials admit this may be the BMC’s first earnest attempt at implementing a report put forward by a fact-finding committee. The Bombay high court had appointed the Dhanuka committee in 2002, after a boy was killed when a part of a decrepit BMC school building crashed on a student killing him instantly two years earlier.
“The civic body had repaired 128 school buildings as per the committee’s recommendations. But both the committee and corporators were dissatisfied with the outcome. So this time, we have appointed eight pairs of private consultants and architects who can give the buildings a professional touch,’’ said education committee chairperson, Mangesh Satamkar.
So out go the traditional blackboards, mosaic floorings and brown-tan walls to make way for green boards, colourful tiles and dados (the lower portion of the wall) and walls painted in cheerful colours. Display shelves for children to display their craft-work as well as soft boards for inspiration messages and paintings will be another added feature.
“The present architecture doesn’t take into account the child’s needs in a classroom. We have made a detailed study of each feature so as to make it more child-friendly. For instance, the height of wash basins, the distance between the first bench and blackboard, class size and colour, ventilation etc,’’ said a civic official working on the project.
Of the 687 BMC school buildings, only 456 are currently in use. Many dead spaces and under-utilised classrooms will also be used for increasing the dismal number of civic English medium and secondary schools. To cater to growing demand, BMC will also open 84 new English medium schools. Plans are also afoot to provide for kindergartens and balwadis in schools across all mediums. The existing system of civic education has no provision for pre-school education.
Outside of the classrooms, the only other facility is a computer lab. “Now we will have libraries with reading rooms, tiffin rooms, multi-media rooms, music and arts rooms and rooms for vocational training,’’ said the official. Currently the definition of vocational training in civic schools is limited to carpentry for boys and sewing for girls.
The scope will soon be widened to include relevant subjects like hardware programming and mechanical training. Dieticians have been roped in to change the menu of the mid-day meal scheme from the staple diet of a kitchen to a more wholesome meal.
Educationist and founder of Muktangan, a voluntary organisation that assists the BMC in three schools, Elizabeth Mehta, feels the renovation of school buildings to make them more child-friendly is definitely a step in the right direction.
“The architecture of school buildings should be designed with the educational process in mind,’’ she says. However, Mehta adds that pedagogy of education followed inside the classroom should also be as child-friendly as the building.
BUDGET WISE
The drafting of the civic education budget will no longer be a one-man show. With the civic education department’s bid to decentralise the BMC budget, headmasters of BMC schools will actually have a hand in shaping the budget, beginning next year. Earlier, the drafting of the education budget was the prerogative of the Education Officer alone.
“We have identified 300 items required by BMC schools. We have asked all headmasters to draw up the costs that the school will be likely to incur in the next year, based on the number of each item (eg, footballs, tubelights) they require,’’ said SS Shinde, deputy municipal commissioner.
Each headmaster will present his cost list to an administrative officer (AO) overseeing his school. The 47 AOs in the city will act as 47 cost centres, drafting mini budgets pertaining to their requirements. This will ensure that headmasters get the money they ask for. Even if BMC cannot afford to allocate the amount asked for by each school, the budget will be split proportionally among schools, based on their demands.
“All these years the education officer would sit in his head office and decide how much each of the 1,237 civic schools deserve. But now each school will get a more or less fair representation in the budget,’’ said Mangesh Satamkar, the chairperson of BMC’s education committee. TNN