Gurugram: Last week, a Haryana government school teacher in Bhiwani’s Sangwan village was suspended over the weekend and two cooks were sent home—all because of a video shot on a phone.
The video showed insects crawling through the mid-day meal ration, cracks running down the walls of the primary school, and toilets too dilapidated and untidy to use. It came from three volunteers associated with the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP).
That visit is now part of a pattern playing out across the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-ruled states. In roughly 10 days, the satirical outfit’s social-media campaign to document broken toilets, missing benches and dilapidated buildings has forced at least four state governments to respond with fresh money, new restrictions on who may enter a school campus, and, in Maharashtra, a police complaint against the CJP founder, Abhijeet Dipke.
What started as a School Thik Karo campaign, launched on this Independence Day, has evolved into a citizen social-audit campaign, according to the CJP. It has, so far, covered schools in Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Bihar, Uttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh, and Tamil Nadu.
Also Read: Abhijeet Dipke’s Swades moment—his village school gets benches for the first time
Haryana: The sarpanch-first ploy
In Haryana, Education Minister Mahipal Dhanda announced Sunday that no one would be allowed inside a government school without first coordinating with the sarpanch, the School Management Committee (SMC) and other responsible people from the village.
Briefing the media in Hansi after a district grievance committee meeting, Dhanda was careful to frame the move as procedural rather than restrictive. There was no blanket ban on entry, he said, only a need to fix accountability and avoid untoward incidents.
Schools, he added, were among a village’s most important institutions and could not be turned into a stage for political point-scoring.
The announcement followed the Sangwan school episode, and came within a day of the School Education Department releasing Rs 130 crore in the first phase to carry out roughly 2,800 identified development works—dilapidated buildings, missing boundary walls, toilet shortfalls and disabled-access facilities among them—to be taken up in phases based on need and priority.
On Monday, Dhanda inspected a government school in Karnal’s Raipur Rodan village. He posted pictures of himself on Facebook inspecting a school in Karnal, dressed not in his usual kurta pyjama but in trousers and a T-shirt. The pictures showed him talking to teachers and villagers and checking classrooms.
“Today, I conducted a surprise inspection of the Government School located in Raipur Roran village, Karnal district, and reviewed the school’s arrangements and academic activities,” the Haryana education minister said in the post.
The minister said that he spoke with teachers and students and sought information about the quality of education, discipline and the school’s requirements, while also issuing necessary directions.
“Providing quality education, a better academic environment and building a bright future for students remain our top priorities. Our resolve is to ensure that students in every school across the state have access to better facilities, excellent education and a conducive learning environment,” he added.
Rajasthan: Assault, ultimatum & Rs 12,500 cr grant
Rajasthan’s reckoning has been sharper still. On 21 August, a CJP team led by co-convenor Ashutosh Ranka was chased and attacked when they were on the way to inspect a government primary school in Jaipur’s Bagru constituency.
The school in question was operating from a cattle enclosure as the main building was declared unsafe. Ranka alleged his volunteers were beaten, their vehicle windows smashed, and that one of them suffered a fractured arm. Dipke alleged that the Rajasthan Police did nothing as BJP workers targeted CJP volunteers.
The BJP leaders denied involvement and accused the CJP of trying to create unrest, with minister Avinash Gehlot calling it a group of “anarchic elements”.
The Rajasthan government moved fast on two fronts. Its Director of Secondary Education barred outsiders from entering school campuses, filming, or collecting students’ or teachers’ personal details without prior permission, citing the safety and privacy of children.
Then, a day after the Bagru attack, the government admitted in the Assembly that 611 government schools have no buildings of their own, a disclosure made in response to an Opposition question.
It ordered a new building at the Rampura Kanwarpura school where the attack had taken place, work to begin 1 September.
On Sunday, Chief Minister Bhajan Lal Sharma’s office announced a three-year, roughly Rs 12,500-crore roadmap to rebuild school infrastructure across all 41 districts, which the CMO contrasted with the past spending of around Rs 2,200 crore over five years.
Maharashtra: Mission mode & an FIR against Dipke
In Maharashtra, where the campaign began at Dipke’s native village in Hingoli on August 15, the pushback has turned legal. An FIR was registered in Latur after Dipke and his associates allegedly entered a Zilla Parishad Urdu school in Jawali, near Ausa, without authorisation while classes were on, sat with students, questioned them, and filmed inside the campus.
The complaint also alleges threats to have teachers suspended.
Separately, Deputy Chief Minister Eknath Shinde held a four-hour review of the School Education Department on Saturday night and directed officials to work in “mission mode” on a time-bound, comprehensive transformation of the system — greater MLA and MP involvement in adopting schools, corporate participation in modernising campuses, and closer attention to student nutrition, health and the Mid-Day Meal Scheme.
Uttar Pradesh: defiance, then a checklist
Responding directly to the CJP’s call for citizens to film government schools, Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath responded to the School Theek Karo campaign to go ahead with it, pointing to his government’s Operation Kayakalp programme for toilets, drinking water and smart classrooms.
The state has separately been contending with its own student protests—in Lucknow, girls from a Sarvodaya school blocked a road demanding teachers and hostel facilities, while students in Hamirpur marched nearly 5 km to the district collectorate over the absence of a proper road to their school.
On 20 August, the UP education department issued a 14-point checklist to nearly 40,000 primary and secondary schools, covering basic infrastructure and cleanliness parameters.
Separately, the state government has issued an order widely seen as targeting ‘YouTubers’ and social-media activists entering school campuses to film, a move the Opposition has criticised as an attempt to shield the administration from scrutiny rather than fix the underlying problems.
The opposition leaders have accused the Yogi Adityanath-led BJP government of trying to manage the optics rather than fixing the problems. Whether these promises in the four states survive once the news cycle moves on is the question now to watch out for in the coming days.
(Edited by Tony Rai)
What happens to opposition ruled state ? Sorry I thought it was about children not politics. Anyway atleast there is something positive coming out of CJP