Students made to sit on floor to write board exams

Balwant Garg

Tribune News Service

Faridkot, March 19

Bending down to write examinations would have been uncomfortable for the students sitting on the floor under the sun in the absence of benches. But the students at Government Senior Secondary School, Jaito, in Faridkot, are struggling with the same situation these days.

About 1,000 students in the school are appearing for the Class VI, VII, VIII, X and XII final examinations these days.

As the school authorities failed to provide benches to all these students, putting the students to the hard task of writing the exam while sitting on the floor, the school authorities have made queues of students under the open sky here.

Even in the absence of any floor mats, these students are sitting in the playground to write their answer scripts.

They could be seen struggling with the answer sheets and the question paper so as to make themselves ‘comfortable’ in writing with sheets in their laps.

While some are taking help of bricks to sit on, some are even using old newspapers so that their uniforms are not stained.

Jaswant Singh, school principal, appeared helpless. “As the examination centres of other schools have also been made at Government Senior School School, Jaito, there are no adequate number of benches that created the problem,” he said.

Not only benches, the school does not even have adequate number of rooms to make the students sit under the roof to write the exams.

While some rooms in the schools have been in decrepit condition, three rooms have been allotted to the evaluation staff for the assessment of the answer scripts of Class XII students.

About 35 evaluators are making this checking and evaluation of the answer sheets. Not all evaluators are provided chairs to sit. “We are using students’ benches to make evaluation of answer sheets,” said a teacher in the school.

“To accommodate maximum number of students under a roof for writing the examination, we are even taking the risk of using the abandoned rooms,” a teacher said.

Reminiscing about the promise, the SAD-BJP combine had made in its election manifesto about six year ago, the images of Class XII students tapping on laptops and the election manifesto of the Congress, announcing of providing Rs 50 lakh for 4G-enabled smartphones to youths and students in January 2017, students and teachers in Jaito said the state government doesn’t even have money to provide benches for students.

“First of all you just need a comfortable environment and space for learning,” said a teacher. It is a common glimpse in some senior secondary government schools that small children are sitting on benches and a little elder squatting on the floor.

Baljit Kaur, DEO (Secondary), Faridkot, said the details of shortage of furniture in government schools were being collected under the Rashtriya Madhyamik Shiksha Abhiyan. 

“We are hopeful of meeting the shortage in the coming days. The Rashtriya Madhyamik Shiksha Abhiyan is another flagship programme of the Union government, launched in March 2009 with the objective to enhance access to secondary education and to improve its quality,” she added.