Haryana orders 2,814 unsafe school structures down by 30 September

Haryana's School Education Department has ordered the demolition of 2,814 condemned structures in government schools, with physical verification, formal condemnation and demolition to be finished by 30 September. A department official told The Print that some of the entries are entire buildings and many are one or two rooms. Officers who miss the deadline or leave sanctioned money unspent have been told they will face action. No child is to sit in a building already declared unsafe. Until new rooms exist, students are to shift to nearby government schools or other safe government buildings.

The order follows weeks of public pressure from the Cockroach Janta Party's "School Theek Karo" campaign, which has sent volunteers into government schools in Haryana and other BJP-ruled states to photograph missing toilets, cracked roofs and classrooms without benches. Aam Aadmi Party leaders in the state said the government moved only after those visits. The department's own list, however, is now an official count, not a campaign pamphlet. Additional deputy commissioners were told to clean discrepancies in the data and update a shared sheet after earlier versions did not match on the ground.

The government says replacement buildings will be multi-storey "vertical" schools, a design meant to free ground for playgrounds on the same plots. That is a planning choice with a cost. A condemned single-storey block can come down in days. A vertical school needs drawings, tenders and a year. The 30 September deadline covers only the first half of that sequence: get the children out and the unsafe masonry down. It does not promise a new classroom by the same date.

Education Minister Mahipal Dhanda had already tried to control access. After earlier campaign visits he said no outsider should enter a government school without first coordinating with the sarpanch and the school management committee. He also announced about Rs 130 crore in a first phase for dilapidated buildings, boundary walls, toilets and disabled-access work, to be taken up in phases. The new demolition list is larger than a repair budget. You cannot grout a room that has been condemned.

Haryana is not the only state in the campaign's path. The Print has reported similar scrambles in Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan, where ministers have made surprise inspections and released photographs. The political logic is simple. A video of a child under a cracked beam travels faster than a sanction order. A deadline of 30 September is a way to get ahead of the next video.

There is a separate demolition story in Gurugram this week that should not be mixed with the school list. HSVP teams last Friday brought down six religious structures and part of a samadhi in Jharsa on land the authority says it acquired and had already notified. Villagers have asked the deputy commissioner to restore the temples and the shrine. That is an encroachment and faith dispute. The 2,814 figure is a school safety figure. Treating them as one "bulldozer" narrative would blur both.

What the school order will be judged on is narrower. By 1 October, either the condemned rooms are gone and the children are in named alternative buildings, or they are not. Parents will know which without a press release. The vertical replacements will take longer, and that is the part of the file that will still be open when the next academic year starts.