Peshawar is a warning India has already had. Every school building needs a public safety check

On Thursday morning, minutes into the school day, the upper floor of Al-Khair School in Peshawar gave way and crushed the classrooms beneath it. Twenty-eight children aged seven to 16 and a teacher were killed. The city’s police chief did not wait for an inquiry to name the cause: the roof, he said, “was overweight with construction on a weak structure”.

It is tempting to treat this as a Pakistani tragedy. It is also a reminder of our own.

Jhalawar, fifteen months on

On 25 July 2025, shortly after morning prayers, part of the government school building at Piplodi in Rajasthan’s Jhalawar district collapsed on pupils of Classes 6 and 7. Seven children died, the youngest aged six. Villagers said they had warned the tehsildar and the sub-divisional magistrate about the building, about water seeping into its walls and branches growing through them. The district collector said the school had not been on the education department’s list of unsafe buildings.

The responses followed a pattern that the authorities in Peshawar are now repeating. Five staff were suspended. A high-level inquiry was ordered. Chief Minister Bhajanlal Sharma said instructions had been issued “to identify and address structural issues in schools immediately”. In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Governor Faisal Karim Kundi has ordered a structural audit of every school.

Audits ordered in grief are welcome. They are also, too often, where the matter ends. A list of unsafe buildings that did not include the one that fell is not a safety system.

The fair objection

There is a real constraint here. Many schools, especially in rural India, have nowhere else to go. Closing a room or a building means children studying under a tree, or not at all, and repair budgets are thin. Headteachers are not engineers. A blanket rule could empty classrooms without making a single roof safer.

That is an argument for doing this carefully, with money and engineers behind it. It is not an argument for leaving it to chance, or to the monsoon.

What states should do

First, every state should commission a structural check of every school building, government and private, carried out by qualified engineers, and publish the results school by school. Parents should be able to look up their child’s school and see whether it is rated safe, needs repair or must not be used.

Second, the list should be renewed every year before the monsoon, when old roofs and walls soaked by rain are most likely to fail. Both Jhalawar and many of Pakistan’s recent collapses came after heavy rain or added construction.

Third, any room marked unsafe should be closed to classes at once, with the district bound to arrange temporary space within a fixed period. Repairs on such buildings should come first in the school budget, ahead of new projects.

Fourth, villagers’ complaints about a school building should be logged and answered in writing. In Piplodi the warnings existed. Nobody was obliged to act on them.

Finally, private schools should not escape scrutiny. The Peshawar school was private, and so were the Lahore and Dera Ghazi Khan buildings that fell earlier this year. Recognition of a private school should depend on a current safety certificate.

Children are sent to school because it is supposed to be the safest place outside home. The least the state owes them is a roof someone has checked.

The reporting behind this view

• 28children killed when the Al-Khair School roof fell in Peshawar on 15 October 2026
• 7children killed in the Piplodi school collapse, Jhalawar, on 25 July 2025
• 5staff suspended at Piplodi, where villagers said earlier warnings were ignored