By Omar Rashid
New Delhi: Last month, when 22-year-old third-year B.Sc student and social media content creator Gaurav Bharti participated in the Cockroach Janata Party’s ‘School Thik Karo’ campaign to fix rural government schools, he thought it best to start from his own village in the Farukkhabad district of Uttar Pradesh.
Bharti visited the government primary school in Karanpur Majra Bansmei on August 16 – the school was closed since it was a Sunday – and shot a video documenting deficiencies in the infrastructure. In the video, which remains uploaded on his social media pages, Bharti takes viewers through the school compound, showing water accumulation near the classrooms, a dilapidated roof on a disused room, dense overgrowth around a broken boundary wall, no running water in the storage tank, and a complete lack of taps at the washing area. “The latrine bathroom and the water tank kept there are only showpieces. Water never reached them,” he says in the video, in which he also stresses that he would write an application to the gram pradhan requesting him to fix these shortcomings.
Bharti currently has approximately 2.5 lakh followers on Instagram and roughly 1.5 lakh followers on Facebook.
The following day, August 17, Bharti visited the school once again and spoke to the two teachers who were present on the premises. But for all his efforts, Bharti soon found himself in legal trouble. On August 19, police in Farukkhabad registered a criminal case against him based on the complaint of an assistant teacher, who accused him of presenting the overall condition of the school in a distorted and misleading manner. Garima, the teacher, alleged that Bharti showed a dilapidated building located on the school grounds – which already had a cross mark painted on it to signify it was unsafe – as being actively used as a classroom for students. She further said that Bharti stated in the video that the school gets flooded with water, leaving no space left for the children to sit, which consequently leads to them being dismissed early. “The video filmed by Gaurav Bharti inappropriately has been circulated across social media, tarnishing the image of our school,” said Garima in her official police complaint.
She further alleged that on August 17, at around 12:30 pm, Bharti came to the school accompanied by an unknown person who was intoxicated and spoke inappropriately to the two female teachers on duty. “Distressed, we called the emergency police helpline number 112 and summoned the police. Every day, some unruly element comes to the school and harasses us by making videos,” Garima stated.
An FIR was subsequently lodged against Bharti and his companion under Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) sections 352 (intentional insult with intent to provoke a breach of peace) and 353 (circulating false information, rumors, or reports that cause public mischief, along with section 66 of the Information Technology Act.
‘They have falsely implicated me’
Speaking to The Wire, Bharti strongly rejected all the allegations levelled against him, stating that his sole intention was to document the glaring deficiencies in the school’s sanitation, infrastructure, and drinking water facilities so that the students could be served better.
This story was originally published in thewire.in. Read the full story here.
