Delhi municipal polls: Working in school committees helped AAP candidates get training, exposure

The Lajpat Nagar ward in Delhi, from where Sachin Shah of the Aam Aadmi Party is contesting the municipal elections next month, has two worlds. One is middle class, with parks, independent homes and cars. Shah has lived here for all of his 35 years and fully understands the problems of his neighbours – faulty drainage, inadequate street-lighting, shabby parks. The other world comprises six slum clusters – variously described as camps and jhuggi-jhopri (shack) or JJ colonies in Delhi – that he became familiar with only after becoming a member of the school management committee of the Government Co-educational Senior Secondary School in Nehru Nagar, which is part of the ward. His work with the committee helped him get a grasp of the concerns in the camps, which are home to 7,000 to 8,000 voters.

“When we went to the school, we understood the problems of the camps and our responsibilities,” he said, speaking of himself and fellow committee member Manohar Lal.

The Aam Aadmi Party government nominated Sachin Shah – till recently a business analyst and a member of the party since its inception in 2012 – to the post of social worker in the committee, and Lal to that of MLA nominee. During their tenure, the school has added a computer laboratory and finalised plans for a commerce section among others.

The elections to Delhi’s three municipal corporations – which provide civic services to over 1.1 crore residents through 272 wards – will be held on April 23.

A senior Aam Aadmi Party member said over 35 of the 198 candidates selected by the party so far to contest the polls are nominated members of school management committees.

And for nearly all first-time contestants, their organisation and management skills were tested not in unions and associations, as is traditionally done, but in the statutory bodies of government schools. With the city government placing great emphasis on the education sector, school management committees were given much of the responsibility of running its many initiatives. That provided the contestants with training and access to communities in their wards that they can now leverage for votes.

However, not everyone is happy with this. “I have been saying from the start that the SMCs [school management committees] would be used for the municipal elections,” alleged Ajay Vir Yadav, general secretary of the Government School Teachers’ Association. “They see parents and older students as potential voters.”

Self-governance

The primary objective of such committees in public schools was to transfer the responsibility of their governance from the bureaucracy to the community. The Right to Education Act, 2009 requires a committee to be composed of parents or guardians, elected representatives of local government and teachers, with parents forming at least 75% of its membership.

According to the Delhi Right to Education Rules, 2011, 12 of the 16 members are parents who are elected members (by other parents), the principal is the chairperson, and a parent is the vice-chairperson. The “elected representative of the local authority” has been interpreted to mean the relevant member of the Legislative Assembly. However, the government chose to appoint “MLA nominees” to that post. Additionally, a position for a social worker “involved in the field of education” was included in the Rules. The government also established a network of school management committees, not mandated by law, placing coordinators at district and Assembly constituency levels to oversee the functioning of individual school committees.

Party and committee

By December 2016, there were over a 1,000 government-run schools in Delhi and as many school management committees. A senior member of the Aam Aadmi Party said that all MLA nominees and a large number of those appointed as social workers are party workers. Many of the social workers serve in other positions within the party. For instance, Munni Devi Jatav, 55, the social worker for the school at K2 Block, Mangolpuri, in East Delhi, is also a member of the party’s women’s wing.

“Aam Aadmi Party is all about giving power directly to the people,” a party member said. “The SMC is the first place this has actually happened and we are trying to replicate the model for the mohalla [community] clinics.” (The mohalla clinics offer free consultation, medicines and diagnostic tests all at the same place.)

Like Jatav, Prem Chauhan, 29, is contesting from the Dakshinpuri Extension ward and is a member of the management committees of two schools as well as coordinator for all such committees in South Delhi’s Deoli Assembly constituency.

Outreach through education

Membership to the school committees alone would not have helped the contestants much. But over the past two years and especially in 2016, the Arvind Kejriwal government made education its primary focus. And in its many programmes, most of which demanded significant community outreach, the contestants found a platform.

Last year, the committees helped run summer camps in over 550 schools. Government statistics say over 44,000 children participated.

In July, the government held parent-teacher meetings for 16 lakh students in all of Delhi’s public schools, and the committees helped organise these. In September, it introduced initiatives aimed at improving learning. The mega parent-teacher meeting was repeated in October. All these programmes were heavily publicised through print and radio advertisements and hoardings.

Through November, the committees organised reading fairs on Sundays outside schools, in residential areas, and in community and banquet halls. The members also helped run learning enrichment programmes during school hours.

Gaining familiarity

All this activity has made Madhuri Varshney, a social worker in three school committees and coordinator for all 33 committees in the Matiala Assembly constituency of West Delhi, a familiar face in the area’s slum clusters. She is contesting the municipal elections from the Dwarka-A ward, which includes three JJ colonies and 180 housing societies, and admitted that her work with the committees would stand her in good stead during the campaign.

“Now when I go to the JJ colonies in my ward, the kids there recognise me and alert their parents that ma’am has come,” said the 44-year-old.

Varshney was given the charge of overseeing the activities of the school management committees in 2015. Till then, her reach was limited to constituents like herself – middle-class professionals residing in housing societies. “After I returned to Delhi from abroad in 2008, I joined the residents’ welfare association,” said the engineer, who worked for 13 years with various multinational corporations. “Later, I joined the Dwarka forum, an umbrella organisation of the associations, and am known to residents of the societies because of these.”

In the three JJ colonies though, she is known almost exclusively for her involvement with schools. “The children, some teachers and even parent members of the SMCs know me and tell others who I am,” she said.

Vikash Kumar Singh, a 26-year-old doctor and contestant for the Dilshad Garden ward, recounted the same experience. In the Janta Flats of this East Delhi locality, he is known for keeping his consultation fee low and for being the secretary of the Aam Aadmi Party’s Seemapuri division.

Once he was appointed coordinator for the Northeast district school committees in 2015 and given the responsibility of training their members, his sphere of influence expanded dramatically. “All of Northeast Delhi knows doctor sahab now,” he said.

During his time, social workers from school committees fanned out across the locality to encourage the community to participate in education programmes. Reading fairs were organised in residential areas. When he received a ticket in February to contest the elections, he recalled, “Teachers, students, parents, even estate managers [responsible for maintenance of schools] would accost me on the road to congratulate me.”

Singh, Varshney and Shah are all being assisted by other committee members – party-affiliated social workers and MLA nominees, of course, but also the odd elected parent member – in their campaigns.

Prem Chauhan from Dakshinpuri Extension is the only contestant who is somewhat skeptical of the impact of the school committees. “The school is in my ward but it is attended by children from other wards too,” he pointed out.

Not just politics?

Political parties have traditionally rallied support in the education sector through staff and student unions and associations. However, the Aam Aadmi Party insists its involvement with the school committees has nothing to do with politics

“Social worker or nominees of the MLAs in school management committees are not political positions,” said a party member. “We do not see SMCs as a breeding ground for politicians. That is not what we had intended. But, in our system of decentralisation, their members get an opportunity to work in their own right and feel empowered. This happened naturally and schools have been one of our highest priorities.”

An indication of this empowerment is that several elected committee members who are parents applied for tickets to contest the municipal polls, they said. But, they added, the party selected applicants only after going through feedback from the districts.