JALANDHAR: Punjab Education minister Pargat Singh has not only accepted challenge thrown by Delhi deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia to compare 10 government schools each in Punjab and Delhi but has upped it to 250 schools. He has also said that even as there can’t be any comparison of conditions and challenges in Punjab as compared to Delhi, still things were better in Punjab and schools will be compared on national Performance Grade Index (PGI).
Later in the day, Sisodia tweeted that he would wait for the list of 250 schools from Punjab which improved in last five years and he would also send his list and together they would go to these schools and would also invite the media.
Addressing a press conference in Jalandhar on Friday, Pargat said that Aam Aadmi Party government in Delhi spent money mainly on 10 schools and now these were being used for publicity. "Increasing publicity budget of Delhi government from Rs 22 crore to 600 crore speaks a lot about AAP government's priorities," he said.
"Punjab has over 19,000 schools while Delhi has just over 2,700 and Punjab has large rural areas and border region. Kejriwal is just running a municipality but rushes to compare everything with Punjab which has much bigger challenges. Still there has been a lot of improvement in government school education in Punjab," he said, adding, "Even AAP’s first leader of opposition in Punjab assembly, Advocate H S Phoolka praised Punjab’s improvement in school education."
Later, Pargat in a series of tweets said, “We will have a debate on school infrastructure and number of smart classrooms. We will debate about development of schools in rural and border areas of the state. We will compare data on newly recruited teachers and permanent teachers. We will take the data of increased number of teachers in border schools. We will compare the pupil to teacher ratio of the two states."
He further tweeted, “We will also compare about the challenges and complexes of managing 7 times more schools in far flung areas of Punjab compared to a compact place like Delhi. In the comparison we will take the number of students enrolled in government schools in the last 4.5 years. We will talk about the accomplishments of rural students in quality education. We will talk about the achievements of children of Dalit and economically weaker sections of the society. We will also debate if it is reasonable to spend crores on 10 schools just for show or to provide facilities to lakhs of students by giving grants to hundreds of government schools in the state as required. We will also compare the economic conditions of the respective states & the discrimination by centre in distribution of grants in debate."
