Owner’s responsibility and School Safety Audits in India

In the India of today, we notice that a perseverant and systematic approach towards school safety or for that matter safety in educational habitats is required. Today, one can argue and probably agree at the same time that even the best of the nations struggle to come up with a strategy to effectively deal with this issue, and probably there is no end. The suggestions which come to us range from easy sounding ones such as creating law and legislative mechanisms to perhaps the most complex such as creating opportunities for the educational spaces owners to take responsibility; thus, as a collective towards achieving ‘Zero Life Loss’. Then one recalls the figures overwhelming in India, one can add other educational spaces, approximately 1.2 Million reported Secondary Schools* (figure source: DISE’s http://www.schoolreportcards.in/).

The following five form important components of conducting safety audits at individual schools, placed in order of priority, we think at this moment:

1. The robustness of building structure
2. The school assumes responsible stance during an emergency
3. There exists an Emergency Management Plan within the school
4. Help from external resource agencies such as firefighting, life saving and health, and rescue teams is available
5. Awareness and training programmes, and school habitat improvement is a continual activity

A detailed audit as above is important, but for schools a simple checklist like this (link) can be useful to its owners. While, many known agencies have been doing this important work at higher/top/policy levels, there is a dire need for a harder push and implementation at the ground level as well. There is a significant cost at the field implementation/grassroots level, which needs to be put in to operational and management plans. When risk and benefits are compared, this cost becomes trivial compared to its usefulness.

One can also argue, that it is actually the school’s own responsible stance which is helping to date, and to an extent sporadic and periodic work by responsible individuals which has helped this process. If one collects recent statistics, it may come out that perhaps schools in India are one of the safest in the world, but there still remains a lot to do as one cannot afford to get complacent in the light of rapid development and changes being seen in this part of the world, or for that matter any part of the world.

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*Formal schooling system in India: Kindergarten for three years, then twelve years of school, thereafter college and higher education.