High court directs govt to form school safety audit panels in dists

Cuttack: The Orissa high court has directed the state govt to form a district education infrastructure safety audit committee (DEISAC) in all 30 districts to ensure safety audit of each and every school and issue safety certificates to the school authorities in June every year.The single-judge bench of Justice S K Panigrahi issued the direction on Tuesday while ordering the state govt to pay a compensation of Rs 8 lakh in addition to Rs 2 lakh ex gratia granted to the family of Kunal Pradhan, a Class II student of an upper primary school in Ganjam district, who died after getting trapped under a collapsed wall on the school campus on Sept 24, 2016. In 2017, Sanyasi Pradhan and his wife had filed a petition seeking direction for Rs 5 lakh compensation for the death of their son.“In this case, though the state functionaries have taken prompt steps for payment of ex gratia in favour of the mother of the deceased child, they did not take any precautionary step to avoid such untoward incident. Therefore, a clear case for grant of a decent compensation is made out instead of ex gratia grant,” Justice Panigrahi said. “Though in the present case the original position cannot be restored. However, the victim’s right to be compensated for losses, including physical injury, emotional distress and financial damages, can at least be awarded,” he added.While giving detailed guidelines for the audit panel, the HC specified the district magistrate and collector will head the committee and shall be the monitoring authority for the safety of children to prevent such accidents on school campuses.However, Justice Panigrahi said, “The govt has the liberty to improvise the guidelines issued above or issue a detailed guidelines incorporating some more points since the aforementioned guidelines are only indicative for mitigating future mishap. A comprehensive affidavit to be filed by the secretary, department of school and mass education after notifying the aforementioned directives to all the districts of the state. The said exercise shall be completed within three months...”Justice Panigrahi further directed the department to form “a disaster management team to mitigate any kind of disaster in the form of falling of walls, fire or any other kind of calamity faced by the schools”. The guidelines said the committee should meet at least twice a year. Its members will include the district education officer, block development officer, executive engineer of works/PWD department, executive officer of municipality/NAC and selected headmasters of some high schools and heads of primary/upper primary schools.The committee will form a sub-committee of engineers of rural development and PWD and ensure safety audit of the school infrastructure which shall recommend issuing of safety certificate to the school authority, the guidelines said. “The school headmaster and the block education officer will be held responsible for any kind of mishap due to falling of wall or roof,” they added.“It is the duty of the school headmaster of every school to report to the concerned BDO regarding unsafe walls and scrub up school buildings, and the BDO shall immediately take up the issue before the DEISAC so the issue can be resolved at the earliest,” the guidelines said.