NEW DELHI: A group of school management committee members hoping to meet education minister Manish Sisodia returned disappointed on Wednesday. They had gone to his home — with appointment, they say — to discuss the functioning and budget of SMCs.

“We wanted to speak to him about organizing training for SMCs and allocation for that training. The SMC’s role in formulating the school development plans (SDPs) must also be explained. We also wanted to demand that allocations for maintenance work in schools be increased,” says Rekha Koli of city child-rights NGO JOSH, who’d accompanied the group of about two dozen from various schools in east Delhi.

The SMCs are crucial part of the school system as envisioned in the Right to Education Act . Composed of parents, civil society members, “local authorities”, school teachers and principals, they are the bodies through which the community exercises control over and monitors schools. It has also been a much-neglected part of the system. In Delhi, these bodies were established in 2013, just days before the first deadline for the implementation of the RTE Act. In most schools, says JOSH’s Saurabh Sharma, members weren’t selected through elections. Since then, they’ve been left to their own devices. A survey by the RTE Forum shows that in the case of Delhi, only 66.7% of the members received training; and the majority of the training had been done by NGOs and not the government. Then, only 50% members had participated in formulating SDPs.

“We go to the meetings and there’s a lot to do but nothing gets done for lack of funds,” says Jagdish Prasad, SMC member for Janki Devi Sarvodaya Kanya Vidyalaya , Pocket II, Mayur Vihar. “We have a septic tank in the school that needs to be cleaned out frequently. We want our drains to be connected to the main sewer line but it hasn’t happened.” Prasad had gone – with about two dozen others – to meet Sisodia at home, as they’d been asked to, on Wednesday morning. “We just wanted to meet for two minutes and submit our memorandum. This is a very serious issue,” says Prasad. "We wanted to meet him for the budget," adds Koli, "This delay means we'd have wasted a whole year."

Civil society organisations point out that Sisodia has, in the past, shown willingness to involve the public in governance of schools. During his first stint as education minister in 2014, he’s entrusted to volunteers from the aam janta the task of gathering data on infrastructure problems in schools. School management committees already exist for that purpose.