Ensure total fitness of schools, Kerala rights panel tells local bodies | Thiruvananthapuram News – Times of India

KOCHI: The Kerala child rights commission has once again emphasized the need to ensure total fitness and safety on school campuses before welcoming the children to the premises. The commission made these observations while issuing a directive to local bodies to look beyond just the building structure fitness.
The commission has instructed the local bodies to look at the various other issues that could be harmful to the students coming in, after a long period of Covid close-down.
The commission was issuing directives to local bodies while hearing a suo motu case following media reports that waste from the market was flowing into the drainage next to the office room of AUP School, Kunnamangalam. The drain is just 100m from the school office hall. Commission members K Nazeer and B Babitha visited the school to inspect the premises during the hearing of the case.
The child rights panel said that local bodies should issue fitness certificates or NOC only if they follow all the rules and guidelines that have been issued by the government. “During our interactions with the various district authorities, it has become known to us that local bodies are just checking the building fitness and issuing fitness certificates,” it observed.
In the case of this school, it was found that the waste from the roadsides and other areas as well as the market place was flowing into the drainage next to the school. This drainage is flowing next to the school building. This continuous flow of waste is also stagnating the environment around it which is not good for students’ health as well as the health of the building. Local authorities should inspect such issues and help find a solution for it, the commission said.
It asked the Kunnamangalam panchayat secretary as well as the sub-divisional engineer of national highway authority of India (NHAI) to find a solution to the issue. This happened because the NHAI changed the direction of the drainage flow.
Earlier, following the increase in the number of students coming to schools, the education department had decided to give temporary fitness certificates to schools with roofs made of tin sheets and asbestos.