The Delhi high court (HC) committee set up to inspect schools run by the municipal corporation of Delhi (MCD) and the state government will submit its report on December 1 - two months after the initial October release.

The three-member committee - state counsel Najmi Waziri, petitioner's counsel Ashok Agrawal and advocate S K Dubey - were to inspect 41 MCD schools where students are being taught under tents and government schools.

The committee, however, has so far managed to visit eight or nine schools as most of them have been closed for Comonwealth Games. The delays forced the postponing of the report release.

But if the committee's experience at the schools it visited are any indication, the report could be very damning for schools run by the civic body and the government.

“In almost all the schools we visited the condition was horrible. The schools were dirty, there was hardly any sitting arrangement and there was no proper way of teaching,” Agrawal says.

Activist group Social Jurist with the help of two NGOs – CRY and Chetanalaya – had organized a public meeting in Dwarka and Jahangirpuri earlier this year, where children were asked to write post cards describing the abysmal state of their state government and MCD-run schools in the capital. Nearly 140 postcards were written and sent to the HC chief justice in July by school children. After court’s order the complaints were admitted as a PIL and the committee was formed to look into the matter.

Agrawal says that the schools will be judged on the basis of availability of basic facilities, teacher’s strength and how students are taught. For this, he said, the members will even sit in the classrooms.

“We are not experts but the prima facie report can show the real situation.” He added, “Once we visited this school where an English teacher wrote four lines of a poem, and foour words were spelt incorrectly.”

Before submitting its report the committee has plans to visit at least 30 more schools in the city.