Deputy Chief Minister of Delhi, Manish Sisodia, said on Saturday said that he will stand like a shield in front of the students to protect their future and won't let the BJP shut a single school in the national capital.
Sisodia's statement came after the Lieutenant Governor of Delhi, V.K. Saxena, sought a report from the Chief Secretary over the delay of two-and-a-half years on the part of the Vigilance Department to act on the Central Vigilance Commission's (CVC) inquiry report on construction of additional classrooms in Delhi government schools on Friday.
"The BJP and the Central government are conspiring to shut down Delhi's government schools. The BJP can't tolerate seeing poor children get excellent education in world-class schools," Sisodia said while briefing the media here on Saturday.
"The BJP is scared of the Kejriwal model of education; once the nation understands that schools across India can be transformed like Delhi, there'll be an end to BJP's model of opening private schools everywhere," Sisodia said.
"In the last seven years, over 72,000 schools have been shut in BJP-ruled states to make way for 12,000 private schools. The BJP worked on a mission mode to shut government schools; 51,000 schools were shut between September 2018 and September 2019," the Deputy CM claimed.
Talking about public education at a larger scale, he said, "It is the government's responsibility to provide quality education to each child of the nation... It is our duty to provide them with every facility. BJP's act of shutting down government schools is nothing but injustice. This nation can only develop if government schools are opened all over India and made better than private schools, which cater to 10-20 per cent of the population. We simply can't rely on them."
Sisodia added that talks are doing the rounds that the BJP has dropped the issue of liquor scam and picked up a new 'jumla' of corruption in the construction of classrooms in government schools.
"Earlier, they tried to spread misinformation regarding the excise policy and before that, they made a bogus claim of irregularities in donations received by the Aam Aadmi Party.
"They unleashed the CBI on our leaders, starting with Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal. Then they targeted me. They sent the CBI to my residence four years ago. Later, they filed false FIRs against 40 of our MLAs. But nothing came out in any of the cases.
"They again picked me and created the false narrative of liquor scam. They raided my residence again but the CBI returned empty handed. They know that no matter how hard they try, they will fail each time," Sisodia told the media.