Kathmandu, July 11:

Many students and teachers will suffer if government schools are handed over to communities, speakers at a programme said today.

“Without consulting stakeholders, the government has signed a Rs 250 million agreement with the Word Bank to hand over government schools to communities,” president of the All Nepal Teachers’ Organisation Guna Raj Lohani said.

The community schools cannot guarantee jobs, he said.

The state should spell out what sort of plan is going to be implemented before switching to any model, central vice-president of the Nepal Students’ Association Devendra Poudel said.

The government is trying to shift the burden of running the government schools on communities by handing over the schools, he said.

General secretary of the Nepal National Teachers’ Organisation Babu Ram Adhikari also said that the government should not hand over the schools to communities.

The political parties may be lobbying for this, he said.

Adhikari claimed that the World Bank had pressured the government to hand over the government schools to communities.

“The government has compared schools with community forests,” Shankar Prasad Dhakal, general secretary of the School Employees’ Council, charged.

Thinking that the success it has achieved in preserving the community forests, the government is trying to adopt the same formula, he said.

He demanded that the schools handed over to communities be brought back to the government’s fold.