Deputy CM pulls up education officials for not checking app

‘SCHOOLS UNCLEAN, LABS UNUSED’

ONLY EIGHT of the 41 Delhi education department directors have been regularly checking a mobile app meant to monitor cleanliness and administrative activities in schools.

Education Minister Manish Sisodia, in a meeting with the education director and district and zonal deputy directors on Wednesday, asked them if they had been checking the app and responding to complaints. Most said they were, but when the data was presented, it turned out that only eight of them were regularly logging in.

Sisodia reportedly lashed out at officials for lying about their activity on the app, and said that neither were schools being cleaned properly, nor were computer labs being used the way they should be. He sought a report next week on these two issues. “He had visited four schools that work in the evening shift in the third week of November, and found a thick layer of dust on furniture, dirty windows, unused computer laboratories and students loitering in corridors,” said a source.

Sisodia, in a letter to the education director in the last week of November, had said, “In almost all schools I visited, many children were not inside their classrooms and appeared to be wandering in corridors during teaching hours. There were several classrooms in which there weren't any teachers. Truancy of this kind cannot continue in our schools.”

The government has increased focus on cleanliness and better infrastructure in government schools over the past year. Estate managers were hired on a contract basis in February this year to reduce the burden of overseeing administrative and infrastructure maintenance in schools.

A mobile application for officials was started so that estate managers could log regular reports from schools and department officials could monitor them. The idea was to create a transparent system where all progress could be logged in and made accessible to the department and the minister.

Deputy CM Manish Sisodia