Monitoring PAISA surveys is particularly interesting in Himachal Pradesh’s Kangra district due to the challenges posed to get to schools. Some schools are located close to village centers and on concrete roads, and are easy to find. Others are further away, off mud tracks, between two village centres and harder to find. Yet others are built on hills, they require a steep climb, several nervous leaps over brimming streams and wild scrambling to get to.

This blog is about the latter kind of school, one that has nine students, two teachers (one of whom was the acting headmaster) and a cook – at maximum strength. The school had two classrooms, a neat kitchen and newly constructed toilets and took us a fair amount of effort to get to. The headmaster was surprised to see us (my colleague and I had reached the school close to the end of the school-day); he thought we from education department. When we told him that we weren’t, he looked a little more surprised.

The last time he recalled an official from the block or district visiting his school was four years ago. He said he understood the lack of visitors, as he himself hiked three kilometres up to school and down every day to get to the village’s closest bus stop. The bus stop was still several kilometres away from the block office and even further from the district headquarters, making a visit to the school a day-long affair. However, the School Management Committee (SMC), visited the school frequently. The headmaster relied on them to help with smaller projects, such as clearing out brambles that grew around the school and piling stones on the fringes of the school building to create a makeshift boundary wall – the only thing between the building and a quick tumble down the hill.

The headmaster told us that this distance made it hard for him to procure things for the school. They had recently bought a bookshelf, and he had to pay an additional fee for labourers to carry the rack up to the school. Costs for procurement increased by 10% for the school and the headmaster was reluctant to explain how he smoothed over the arrears.

The monsoons made getting to the school especially difficult. There were two approaches to the school, and both required crossing streams. When it rained, the streams swelled, making it dangerous for children to get to the school. Unfortunately, schools in Kangra stayed shut during summer and reopened just in time for the monsoons. On days when the rain was relentless, neither the headmaster nor the school’s students attended the school.

The visit left me thinking about whether the education planning system can be decentralised to an extent that would suit the specific needs of a school like this one. Procurement, administration and even daily travel seemed problematic to an extent that the staff, community and students of the school were best suited to understand and address. Strong community involvement during the absence of block and district support and supervision seemed essential to the school’s functioning.

Is it possible to create a strong local planning system that truly understands every school’s needs? If not, perhaps science will make greater strides and in the future, we can beam bookshelves into schools.

Until then, “Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand.” (Kurt Vonnegut)