Unsafe schools are a reality in any developing economy and India is no exception. Debacles were there due to safety concerns in the last decade. I can remind you the horrific Kumbhakonam fire tragedy in 2004 took 92 young lives; the 2001 Gujarat earthquake killed hundreds of children—over 400 in a single incident; the 2005 earthquake in Kashmir in which over 17,000 children in India and Pakistan were crushed to death due to the collapse of their school buildings. Though there is opportunity of using schools as safe facilities for public shelter in those disasters, school buildings are an additional liability, and remain to be the worst place for our children. And there is little hue and cry for for safer schools.


The respective local government authorities and all the insurance companies should use a range of quantitative and qualitative methods to reduce the risk factors associated with the schools due to the safety concerns. In many ways this will be mitigation measure. The Insurance cover should be there in a range of disaster-prone areas like flood affected portions of Assam, Rajasthan, and Maharashtra, the earthquake prone portions of Gujarat and Jammu and Kashmir and tsunami-affected portions of Tamil Nadu. Indian Insurance companies should inspire their policy holders to demand certificates of school safety from their respective education authorities in a precaution to avoid any sort of mass scale recovery. The Authorities should certify and take all the necessary steps to make the school safe and prepared for any possible disaster risk. Once such a demand is built, schools and governments are bound to act and the security concerns will decrease.

The Indian insurance sector has the enough resources and the weight to take the lead in this regard . It is a fact that in politics or economics, demand is the king. So the Insurance policy holders create a demand for protecting children at school.