He said the minister’s dogs live better than the children.

He walked into a Zilla Parishad school and said the minister’s dogs live better than the children.

Abhijeet Dipke, convenor of the Cockroach Janta Party, spent Thursday morning in Latur’s Ausa tehsil on a campaign he calls School Thik Karo — fix the government school. Between 10 am and 12.30 pm he inspected the Zilla Parishad schools at Ujani, Ekambi and Ausa. At 2.30 pm he was at Municipal School No. 26 in Labour Colony, Latur city. The format was a 10-point social audit: drinking water, working toilets, electricity, a building that will not fall, a playground, teachers, attendance, schemes, the mid-day meal, safety, disability access, cleanliness. Those are not slogans. They are the minimum a State already claims it provides.

At Ujani he stopped claiming. Asked whether School Education Minister Dada Bhuse should stay, Dipke said the condition of the schools made him feel the minister should not continue. If the government wanted to understand urgency, he said, ministers and MLAs should send their own children into these rooms. “The dogs of these ministers get better facilities than this.” Students, he said, were being treated worse than animals. People vote; the leaders take helicopters. The child still sits under a leaking tin roof without enough benches.

He put a decade on the failure. Basic problems — roofs, benches, toilets, a road that does not drown in the monsoon — had not been solved in ten years. What, then, had the government achieved? Children, he said, still walk up to seven kilometres to reach a school. He asked for buses in remote villages. He referred to reports of children dying of snakebite on that walk. Behind the Ujani building, he said, scrap and garbage had been left to rot; snakes had been found even inside classrooms. A school that keeps a snake in the room has already answered the audit.

The resignation line is political. The rooms are not. A Zilla Parishad school is the only school most of rural Maharashtra will ever enter. If the bench is missing, the child stands. If the toilet is missing, the girl stays home. If the road is a seven-kilometre slush, the monsoon decides attendance. Dipke’s 10-point sheet is a list the education department already prints in a government resolution. Printing it is not providing it.

He told villagers to stop opening the door for a vote until the school is fixed. Come out for the child’s school the way you come out with a caste flag, he said. That is a campaign sentence. It is also the only enforcement rural parents have. A minister will not resign because a convenor asked. A minister might still have to explain why a ZP classroom is a worse shelter than a kennel.

CJP is the same outfit that filled Jantar Mantar last month. Thursday’s Latur walk is the domestic half of that week: after the stick on students in Delhi, the ruin of the government school that produced them. Dipke also said he was not satisfied with the CBI’s NEET leak work in Latur — too many small names, not enough of the system. That is a separate file. The school file does not need a leak. It needs a roof, a bench, a toilet, and a road. Until those four exist in Ujani, “education minister” is a title on a dog’s better day.