Delhi: Teachers worried over heat impact on students' health 

NEW DELHI:  The municipal corporation teachers’ association has raised concern over students falling sick due to the recurring heat wave while attending school for ‘Mission Buniyad’ classes during the summer vacation. The students are not even getting proper meals.

The teachers’ body has requested the Directorate of Education (DoE) to postpone these classes to July. During the vacations, mid-day meals are not provided, as per the academic calendar. The cash-strapped municipal bodies are not able to provide any meals to students during the classes.

Mission Buniyad is a government run program, which is implemented in all civic schools in Delhi to address the ‘learning gaps’ among students that rose during two years of the pandemic as physical classes were not happening.

 “Students in MCD schools come from low-income background and getting a meal is their basic premise of coming to school. Over the past few days, some students have fallen sick which is affecting their attendance. We have requested the Delhi government to postpone classes to July,” said Ramnivas Solanki, general secretary of the association.

While North MCD has over 700 schools, the South civic body has 581 schools and East MCD has 354 schools.  North Corporation commissioner Sanjay Goel said that the civic body is providing two bananas each to students during the break. “We are providing bananas from our own resources. So far we haven’t got any complaints of students falling sick. During the vacation, we don’t get mid-day meal provisions, as food grains from the Food Corporation of India (FCI) are available only for 210 days a year,” said Goel.  

A South Corporation senior official said that so far they have not been able to provide anything to students because of funds constraints. “We have sought funds from the government, but got no response so far. We are in the process of tying up with NGOs to provide snacks to students.”

While officials from the East civic body didn’t respond to queries, Mayor Shyam Sundar Agarwal said that the corporations are struggling for funds. “The schools are trying to make some arrangements. The government has still not released the dues of the first quarter of the year to the corporations,” he said.