Cracks in the System: Chandni Chowk's Urdu Medium Schools Struggle With Neglect
Urdu medium schools in the Bazar Sita Ram area of Chandni Chowk take you back in time, but not in a nostalgic manner. In one school, just two teachers handle 150 students studying in nursery to Class V. One of them is tied up with daily paperwork, the other juggles classes. An unpaid volunteer is the only help for them.
Students sit in two seepage-ridden classrooms. One accommodates nursery to Class II students, the other clubs classes III-V.
"It's hard for just the two of us to manage 150 children, that too of different classes," sighed one teacher. The second, a special educator, added, "I also have to see to the needs of special children. At times, when I'm engaged in office work, they just tag along with me into the cramped office.
What choice do they have?"
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A special concern is the lack of qualified Urdu instructors. Despite exams being conducted in Urdu, worksheets often arrive in Hindi.
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"Unlike English, parents don't put any effort into teaching their children Urdu, so the onus is on us," said one teacher.
TOI's visit revealed the absence of another basic facility. With only two toilets and no separate facility for them, the teachers clean the toilet each time they have to use it.
A few lanes away, the co-ed school in Kucha Pundit mirrors the woes. Here too, 117 students are taught by just two teachers. Rafi Saab, 62, who studied in the same school in 1970, said, "The school predates Partition and it is crumbling due to poor maintenance."
Built in 1919, the school is now surrounded by three-storey buildings.
Rafiya Mahir, MCD councillor from the ward, pointed at the emptied classroom and shrugged, "The foundation is continuously receding. We never know when the structure will collapse. And the two teachers can only do so much." Mahir also claimed that prior to 2007, there were 11 Urdu schools in the area. Now, there were just three.
Of the three schools, the one in Lambi Gali appears in better shape but recently faced an academic hurdle — Hindi worksheets not translated into Urdu for the exams, resulting in the teachers having to translate them on their own. "This is the first time there has been such a discrepancy in exam worksheets," claimed an official in MCD's education department. "The matter will be looked into."
MCD refused to comment officially on the state of the schools, but sources in the body cited the unification of the three corporations as the cause of delayed resource allocation. They claimed repairs would be taken up this year.
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