There is no flat, dreary government school building in Puruna Pitala village in Sheragada block of Odisha’s Ganjam district. Actually, there is. Only it is locked and hidden from view off the road by the new, two-storey building of sober beige with maroon highlights. Old colours, but new trimmings.

The old building stands locked, perfectly fine from the outside if not for its dowdy structure. But then, someone from the village education committee, the monitoring body for functioning of the school, says the building is condemned. Let us, then, change that opening line to ‘There will be no flat, dreary school building…. It is so decreed’.

But by what logic?

If one puts two and two together, one is bound to smell fish. Ashwini Kumar Mishra, the district project coordinator for Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA), says education funds barely go unspent. But at the local level, the village education committees (the citizens’ body overseeing education in government schools at the village level) allege that bills for construction work is pending for many schools — and some dating back from 2006.

One member, not willing to be named, says some engineers in charge of clearing these bills demand a cut. Denied, they delay clearances that lead to the pendency.

Shaking off the scepticism, I enter the new Puruna Pitala primary school. At the entrance, painted on the wall, is a number: 1800 3456 722. “School Student Helpline”, the sign says.

The state government has installed a helpline for students but one wonders if it serves as anything more than a gimmick. I ask one of the oldest students playing nearby, a girl of about 10 years, if she knows what it is for. She looks lost and stares at her feet.

Basantilata Sahoo, the headmistress (in-charge) and one of the two teachers for the school’s 58 students from classes I to V, replies on her behalf, saying that students can call on the number if they find any deficiencies in their learning experience. Asked about the old building, she says it is being used as a mess hall for midday meals for students.

Manoranjan Panda, a member of the village education committee, who accompanied me to the school, says though the new building has been equipped with a fan and a tube light in each of the two classrooms, ironically the building has no connection to the grid. “The light and fan are just fixtures,” he says.

Education left rudderless, a victim of ‘norms’
The conversation them steers to the problems the teaching staff face. “According to SSA, the teacher to student ratio is 1:40. The Right to Education (RTE) Act has revised it to 1:30,” Sahoo says. “In a school like ours, the norms just increase the workload for the teachers. If I were teaching just one class, teaching 30 or 40 students would not have been a problem. But we fit in the fifth and fourth standards in one room and the first, second and third in the other.

“I have to alternate between two classes all the time — while I teach one, students in the other are given some tasks to complete.”

On days one of the teachers has to take a leave, the other has to manage all five classes, she adds.

“We could have more children in the classes we run to bring up the strength to a number where more teachers would need to be appointed. But we are losing out to private schools and the Saraswati Shishu Mandirs that are coming up everywhere,” Panda adds as an afterthought.

It is not just in Purana Pitala that education has been left so rudderless. Almost all of Sheragada faces the same challenge. Of the 137 primary and upper primary schools and the four high schools with classes VI to X, only 12 have a permanent appointee at the head teaching and administrative posts. The rest make do with ‘in-charges’.

Norms seem to be the spanner in the works here, too. The post of headmaster/headmistress is open to only teachers who hold a graduation degree in education, a B.Ed. But most are like the one in Purana Pitala — Sahoo is not even a graduate; she holds an intermediate degree. So the norms rule out the appointment of these teachers as the school head while they are forced to serve as in-charges for long periods.

Sahoo has been in an in-charge, a post supposed to be temporary, for the last two years.

A visit to the block resource centre (the block-level monitoring office for SSA) fails to clear much of the confusion regarding expenditure patterns, especially expenditure on school infrastructure. Officials say new buildings are being commissioned in instances where safety inspections found the old buildings “dilapidated”.

The concern isn’t frivolous – five children, all below six years, died when a wall collapsed on them at an anganwadi centre in Suansia village of Nayagarh district in July. The state government could be serious in its efforts to pre-empt a repeat. But in the process is it not, as is evident from the Puruna Pitala case, throwing out the baby along with the bathwater?