Abhijeet Dipke, founder of the Cockroach Janta Party, on Tuesday called on education ministers, bureaucrats and school inspectors across India to enrol their own children in government schools, arguing that the move would force rapid improvement in a system he says has been starved of teachers, transport and basic oversight for years. The demand, delivered in the middle of a district he has turned into the epicentre of a growing campaign over rural school conditions, was framed by Dipke as a test of whether officials genuinely believe in the institutions they run or simply administer them from a distance.
Speaking to reporters in Limbala village in Maharashtra’s Hingoli district, Dipke said officials responsible for running government schools do not send their own children to the institutions they administer. It is their job to run government schools in a proper way, seeing that teachers are available, he said.
Dipke Sets Out The Demand
Dipke said the requirement should extend to ministers and elected representatives, not only civil servants. He said politicians should be made to send their children to village schools for at least one day and walk the same distances rural students cover to reach class.
The life of a tribal child should have the same value as that of a minister’s child, Dipke said, adding that the children of many senior officials study abroad while children in rural Hingoli walk seven to ten kilometres to attend classes. He said the government had also failed to provide transport facilities for students in remote areas.
Dipke did not name individual ministers or officials in his remarks. He said the campaign was directed at the state and central education departments rather than at village level functionaries such as sarpanches, and said villagers would act on their own if conditions did not improve.
Protest Followed Viral Video Of Headmaster
Dipke’s comments came days after he shared a video showing the headmaster of a local Zilla Parishad school allegedly arriving at school intoxicated and sleeping during class hours. The video prompted sit in protests by Dipke and local villagers under a campaign he has called School Thik Karo.
The headmaster was removed from his post on Tuesday, according to Dipke and local officials. The school principal here used to come drunk to the school. We have been protesting, demanding the principal’s removal. I have been informed that the principal has been removed from his post, Dipke told the news agency ANI. He said the Cockroach Janta Party was also demanding the recruitment of two additional teachers at the school and that protests would continue until that demand was met.
Authorities have not issued a separate public statement confirming the reason for the headmaster’s removal. Similar cases involving teachers found intoxicated, absent or asleep during school hours have been reported in Maharashtra’s Jalna and Nanded districts in recent years, in each instance following the circulation of a viral video.
Context: A Recurring Complaint In Rural Education
Complaints about unfilled teaching posts, poor infrastructure and weak oversight in government schools are longstanding in rural Maharashtra and in several other Indian states. Enforcement action in such cases has typically followed public pressure generated by video evidence rather than routine departmental inspection, a pattern repeated in Hingoli this week.
Separately, private schools in several Indian cities have faced accusations of increasing fees without adequate justification, prompting opposition parties including the Aam Aadmi Party to call for investigations into fee practices in Delhi. Officials of the private schools named in those complaints have not issued detailed public responses. Dipke has not commented directly on the private school fee disputes, and his campaign in Hingoli has focused on government school administration and staffing.
Dipke, who returned to India in June after studying at Boston University in the United States, founded the Cockroach Janta Party earlier this year following remarks by a senior judicial figure that compared unemployed youth to cockroaches and parasites. The party, which describes itself as a satirical political movement, has since organised student led protests in several Indian cities on issues including examination reforms and, more recently, the condition of rural government schools.
The Road Ahead For The Campaign
Dipke said the sit in protests in Hingoli would not be called off until the two additional teaching posts are filled, and he signalled that School Thik Karo would expand beyond the district in the coming weeks. He gave no fixed date or list of the villages likely to be targeted next.
The Cockroach Janta Party has built its national profile on turning localised grievances into sustained pressure campaigns, a strategy that forced the resignation of the former Union Education Minister in July after a 37 day protest at Jantar Mantar. Whether the same approach can compel a state government to act on staffing shortages, or on Dipke’s broader demand that officials enrol their children in government schools, is likely to depend on how much traction the campaign gains outside Hingoli.
For now, neither the Maharashtra government nor the Union education ministry has responded publicly to the demand. Political analysts have not yet weighed in on whether such a rule is administratively feasible, and no draft policy has been tabled in either the state assembly or Parliament. Dipke’s team said it expects a response from the state education department within the week.
The Maharashtra education department has not issued a statement on the headmaster’s removal or on the staffing shortage cited by Dipke and local villagers. This report will be updated if the department responds.
