Winter at peak, students yet to get uniform

Deepkamal Kaur

Tribune News Service

Jalandhar, January 9

With mercury plummeting to as low as 2 degree Celsius and the state government claiming that the woollen uniform to 12.76 lakh students would be given by January 31, the school authorities have chosen to rather depend on area NRIs so that the children do not have to suffer.

Some government schoolteachers claimed that the children were either wearing undersize uniform or pullovers worn at home. Despite extreme cold, many were coming to schools in slippers. Teachers of most schools said the attendance had also fallen since the onset of winters.

It was on January 1 that the Director General of School Education (DGSC) sent a circular to school heads asking them to start making arrangements for placing orders for uniform and get it readied by January 31 and that 90 per cent of the Rs 76.57 crore grant would be released soon.

An amount of Rs 600 each has been sanctioned for uniform, which includes a trouser, a shirt, a pair of shoes, socks, a cap or turban and a pullover for boys and a salwar kameez with dupatta, pullover, a pair of shoes and socks for girls

The teachers said arranging for all such items in the sanctioned amount was unlikely and they could not meet the requirement without any help from NRIs or social organisations or by pooling in money from their own pocket. Also, procuring pullovers of the same colour at a short notice was a huge task.

Akali MLA Pawan Tinu said the parents of students had been approaching him with the problem. “I talked to some NRI donors in my area and we started distributing uniform,” he said, as 118 students of Government Middle School, Sanghwal, were given pullovers and shoes today. He said a similar programme had been arranged at Nizamuddin village.

The school authorities said they had contacted gurdwaras and social clubs to donate for students’ winter uniform.