Risk Wise

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Auditing school safety in India: lessons for Asia

Vishal Pathak and Sanchit Oza, All India Disaster Mitigation Institute

nsafe schools are a reality in India. With the spread of

education, more and more children go to schools that are

vulnerable to fire, floods, earthquakes, cyclones, pollu-

tion, food poisoning, stampede and so on. At repeated great cost,

this has been seen many times in the last decade. Despite the

opportunity of using schools as safe facilities for public shelter

following disasters, school buildings are an additional liability,

and the worst place to concentrate our children. It is a wonder

that there is growing national demand for electricity, clean air,

and safe water, but not for safer schools. Appreciating risk is a

well-developed skill among India’s growing retinue of investors

and businesses including the insurance sector. Yet such risks

relate to near-term issues – such as returns on stocks and

mutual funds – and are not connected well enough with a crit-

ical lifelong investment: the safety of our own children in their

schools. Indian children remain exposed to risks in schools. This

paper highlights the experiences and lessons of the All India

Disaster Mitigation Institute (AIDMI) and its partners, and the

results of a recent school safety audit in India intended to help

practitioners and policy makers in Asia.

Context

In recent years, India’s schools have sustained many catastrophic inci-

dents: a fire led to the deaths of over 400 people – about half of them

students – at a school’s prize-giving ceremony in Haryana in 1995; the

Bhuj earthquake caused the deaths of 971 students, more than 400 in a

single incident and 31 teachers, in Gujarat in 2001; a fire at the Lord

Krishna School in Kumbhakonam, Tamil Nadu took the

lives of 94 children in 2004; thousands of students and

teachers were killed, injured or otherwise affected in the

2004 South Asia tsunami; in the 2005 earthquake in

Kashmir, more than 17,000 children in India and Pakistan

were crushed to death under their school buildings, and

15 children and three teachers died in a boat accident

during a school picnic at Kerala in 2007. These are a few

tragic examples of disasters that pose a regular threat to

students and teachers.

One of the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) is

to enrol all children worldwide in school by 2015. With

a large percentage of the Indian population living in

poverty (36 per cent living below the official poverty line)

and with a literacy rate of just over 50 per cent, it is imper-

ative for the future development of India that children

have access to education. Over 78 million children are

currently in need of schooling. To meet this great demand,

many schools are overburdened and compromise on

safety.

The Government of India’s District Primary

Education Programme (DPEP) and Sarva Shiksha

Abhiyan (SSA), which aim to achieve universal primary

education by 2010, have yet to focus on school safety. The

National Common Minimum Programme (NCMP) of the

Government of India also puts direct and full emphasis on

“providing universal access to quality basic education.”

However, unsafe schools adversely affect the quality of

education in poor and low-income areas. Further, chil-

dren have a right to education, but their right to safer

schools is not recognized or even articulated.

In general, awareness of school safety issues is rising

and is reflected in key global initiatives such as the

global campaign on ‘Disaster reduction begins at school’

launched by UNISDR in 2006 and the work of the

Coalition for Global School Safety (COGSS) and its part-

ners worldwide.

However, a lot remains to be achieved.

Child’s Right to Safer School campaign

AIDMI began working informally with school safety

issues at its inception in 1989, and later consolidated

and organized this important work as the Child’s Right

to Safer Schools campaign in response to the 2001 earth-

quake in Gujarat. The campaign aims to reduce

hazard-induced losses in schools by increasing aware-

ness, developing school-specific disaster preparedness

plans, promoting structural and non-structural safety

measures and insuring school children, teachers and

administrators against accidents of any kind. The

A school-specific safety audit can be a first step toward making schools safer

Image: AIDMI. School Safety Audit 2008