SC not to interfere in reopening of schools

SC not to interfere in reopening of schools

21/09/2021

“The situation may vary according to factors like the size of the State to density of population. It’s the decision of each State to see the areas where there is a spike in cases and act accordingly. Ultimately, it’s best to leave it to the governments to decide. We cannot take over governance,” he noted.

Justice Nagarathna pointed out that teachers had to be vaccinated and children had not been vaccinated yet.

“The government is ultimately responsible to bring children back to school. We cannot direct them to open up in a time-bound manner. We have just come out of the second wave. There may be a third wave, though it may not be as devastating,” Justice Chandrachud remarked. The issue of whether to send children to school for physical classes or not and when to do that concerned the “complexities of governance which makes it eminently a case on which the court should not interfere”.

Advocate Ravi Prakash Mehrotra, for the petitioner, said the plea was not meant to be “publicity seeking”. Instead, it focused on the psychological and physical damage children were being subject to by not going to school. Many thousands of children also depended on schools for their midday meal. Justice Chandrachud agreed that there was a need to balance the need to keep children safe from the virus with the requirement to keep them physical and mentally healthy.