There were no bathrooms and toilets in many government hostels for boys and girls belonging to backward classes, particularly in Koppal and Bidar districts, and the students were forced to go outside to ease themselves and to take bath, a report submitted to the Karnataka High Court by the District Legal Services Authority (DLSA) on Thursday said.

The report was submitted before a Division Bench, comprising Chief Justice Abhay Shreeniwas Oka and Justice Hemant Chandangoudar, during the hearing on a PIL petition, initiated suo motu by the court based on a letter by All-India Lawyers’ Union, Karnataka, on the incident of electrocution of five boys in a government hostel at Bannikatti in Koppal district on August 18, 2019.

“The reports show that in most of the hostels run by the State there is no supply of basic amenities like hygienic food, cot, bed, bedsheets, drinking water, electricity connection, clean toilet, water for bathing, etc. Most of the hostels are reported to have unhygienic kitchen and low quality food is being supplied to the children. Drinking water is not available in a major number of hostels inspected in these districts,” stated advocate B.V. Vidhyulatha, who is the amicus curiae appointed by the court for this case, in a memo.

The amicus curiae also presented the reports of inspections of government hostels carried out by the DLSA in Bidar and Koppal districts as a sample to narrate the state of affairs of government hostels in the State.

Following this, the Bench directed the government to submit the gist of the survey, conducted by the district-level committees appointed by the State government as per the court’s October 30, 2019 order, of hostels in Bidar and Kalaburagi where the DLSA had pointed out that students, including girls in some hostels, were going outside the hostels to ease themselves.

In its statement, the government stated that the survey was carried out by the committees headed by Chief Executive Officer of the zilla pancyayat of the respective district, and the process of survey was concluded only on February 5 while seeking time to collate the details of the survey and submit them to the court.

It was also pointed out in the government’s statement that there were 2,438 government hostels for backward classes and 1,325 of them were operating from the government’s own buildings and 1,030 hostels were run from rented buildings.