AMC schools closed till june 30


The Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation has taken a decision to close all the schools till June 30 following the collapse of a wall and subsequent to the death of a child at Rajpur school in Sunderam nagar said the municipal commissioner, K. Kailashnathan here on Tuesday.

This means that these schools will reopen 15 days late. Announcing this at a press conference, Mr. Kailashnathan said that the schools would not be reopened till almost all the buildings are repaired. We do not want to risk any more lives."

"The preliminary inquiry in Rajpur school mishap reveals that the headmaster was at fault. We had categorized the school building as dangerous and advised the school authorities not to use it for academic activities. We want to find out why the school building was being used for the academic activities?" he said.

In all, there are 262 AMC-run schools from which 114 schools are extremely safe and fall under the G-1 or G-2 category. There are 119 school buildings that need major and minor repairs.

"Most of the schools were in need of maintenance even before the quake. We are now going for massive repairs and maintenance work, which is likely to cost around Rs 5 crore," said Mr. Kailashnathan.
However, why the AMC authorities did not swing into action before crossing the June 15 deadline is not clear. The municipal commissioner avoided answering the question by saying that AMC has a lot of work to do. He did not reply to the query whether this meant that starting the schools on time was not high on the agenda of the AMC.

Meanwhile, no details of where or how the alternative schools will start functioning are given out. UNICEF has given 307 tents to the AMC for starting the schools in alternative sites, but these have not yet been put to use.

In all, 17 school buildings need to be demolished and AMC is planning to develop 18 buildings as heritage buildings for which the state government will give grant. The total cost of rebuilding and repairs is expected to be around Rs 18.5 crores, said Mr. Kailashnathan.

He added that while 80 per cent of the repairs work will be completed by June 30, the repairs work will be completed by July 10. It may be noted that the decisions regarding the school board were not taken on time.

The school board chairman, Ganpat Parmar had issued a press release about 15 days ago, saying that funds were not being released to the school board and there was delay in taking the decisions.

Bapunagar police has registered a case of accidental death and is investigating the case further. The student who died in the collapse was an eight-year-old Mohammed Bilal Ansari, living in Ansarinagar. The wall fell down on 11 am and the boy, who was studying in second standard, was killed due to the injuries.
Another matter of inquiry is what the student was doing at 11 in the morning if he was a student of the afternoon batch with the time of 2 o’clock in the noon or the 12.45 PM batch?

The deputy municipal commissioner, general administration, Vinay Vyasa will hold an inquiry in the matter and submit the report to Mr. Kailashnathan on Wednesday.

Republished from TheAsian Age