– Mita Mukherjee

The Bengal school education department will hand over the “unused” assets of 933 state-aided schools with zero-enrolment to the state government to examine how the campuses can be utilised for other purposes, school education minister Dipak Barman said.

“We will hand over the assets to the government. The buildings, playground, infrastructure and all the physical assets of these schools are lying unused for several years. We want the government to review the assets and take a decision on how to utilise them and on what purposes they can be used. A committee set up by the government will examine the zero-enrolment schools,” Barman said.

There are schools identified by the government which have not enrolled a single student for five to 20 years, an official of the school department said.

However, the minister said the government also intends to find out the reasons behind the failure of the schools to attract students.

“In certain areas the enrolment of some schools is good. If we find that in the same area one particular school recorded zero-enrolment over the years, then we will have to think about the future of those schools,” the minister said.

According to the school education department, most of the 933 schools, including primary, upper primary, secondary and higher secondary, identified by the government with zero-enrolment are mostly in Kolkata and urban areas where private English medium schools had been mushrooming over the last two decades. The state-aided schools, most of which are Bengali medium, started losing students as more and more parents wanted to educate their wards in private English medium schools.

After the new BJP came to power, it took a move to find out some alternative measures for proper utilisation of the zero-enrolment schools. This, however, raised speculations that the intention of the government was to hand over the assets of the schools to private groups for business purposes under public-private partnership (PPP) model.

The school education minister clarified that no such plan has been made.

“There are schools that have not enrolled students for past 20 years. The schools cannot run in the absence of students. But we have no plan to bring any school under PPP model. No school has joined the PPP model,” the minister said.

The state government had recently issued an order asking each district to form a committee headed by the district magistrate to physically verify the schools. The committees have been asked to prepare a list of the assets like the land and buildings and the kind of facilities available in each of the schools.

The committees will find out how suitable the schools are for alternative purposes and examine the possible uses keeping in mind the local requirements. The alternative purposes could be training or health centres, animal resource development centres or community or public-service facilities.

Also read: TN: Pvt school approval fraud case: Ex-minister Anbil Mahesh grilled by police