Rampura’s School Rebuild Was Funded Before the CJP Clash

A bulldozer brought down the old Government Primary School in Rampura Kanwarpura on September 2, 2026. The village school near Jaipur had taught children beside buffaloes after the 1985 building was locked as unsafe in September 2025.

Cockroach Janta Party workers call the razing a win for School Thik Karo. The largest cheque, though, was a District Mineral Foundation Trust grant of Rs 12 lakh sanctioned on August 13, eight days before the inspection that became a street fight.

The Mining Cheque Landed Eight Days Early

The Rajasthan government said the new building for Government Primary School, Rampura (Kanwarpura), in Sanganer block, would cost Rs 18 lakh. Of that, Rs 12 lakh came from the District Mineral Foundation Trust on August 13. Another Rs 6 lakh came from the MLA fund, confirmed in a late-night announcement on Saturday, August 22, the day after the clash.

School Thik Karo itself began on August 15, when CJP founder Abhijeet Dipke opened the drive from Santuk Pimpri in Maharashtra’s Hingoli district. The Rampura visit was six days later. Even if the campaign hurried the remaining grant and the demolition date, it did not open the mining-fund file.

Those trusts exist to spend mining royalties on people who live near mines. The national DMF portal lists education as a high-priority spending head under PMKKKY, with at least 70 percent of money reserved for such work. Rajasthan’s District Mineral Foundation Trust was set up in 2016 in all 33 districts after a May 31 notification, funded by a cut of royalty on mining leases.

The legal hook is older than this quarrel. The 2015 mining law that created the trusts told states to build a non-profit body in every mining-affected district and to spend it on those areas, not on a general publicity win.

THE MONEY AND THE CLASH

1. September 2025: A technical survey declares the 1985 building unsafe and it is taken out of use.
2. August 13, 2026: Rs 12 lakh is sanctioned from the District Mineral Foundation Trust.
3. August 15, 2026: Dipke launches School Thik Karo from Santuk Pimpri.
4. August 16, 2026: Rajasthan’s Director of Secondary Education orders outsiders to get a principal’s approval before entering government schools.
5. August 21, 2026: A CJP team led by co-convener Ashutosh Ranka is stopped at the village edge and a fight follows.
6. August 22, 2026: The government announces the full Rs 18 lakh package and a September 1 start.
7. September 2, 2026: The old building is bulldozed by 11 am, with district and education officials present.

A year sat between the unsafe finding and the blade. Eight days sat between the mining cheque and the stones. The politics moved faster than the brickwork either time.

What Rs 18 Lakh Buys in Rampura Kanwarpura

The state said the school has 18 students and two teachers. Staff described a new plan of two rooms and a washroom, the same modest footprint the old place once had: two classrooms, a veranda and toilets, put up in 1985.

After the lock in September 2025, officials floated a shift to the government senior secondary school in nearby Beelwa. Villagers refused, citing the children’s age and the commute, so lessons moved into a cattle enclosure. On September 1, a teacher said, staff carried the remaining items into a local resident’s house, which is now the classroom until walls go up.

THE Rs 18 LAKH PACKAGE

Villagers told the school they would raise extra money locally if the job overran. No official completion date has been announced. Education department officials now hold land rights on the plot, a teacher said, and staff hope a proper building will pull enrolment up. Hope is not a deadline.

A Caste Case Followed the School Visit

On August 21, vehicles were halted at the village border, away from the school. CJP worker Rekha Sharma’s complaint at Shivdaspura police station, under Jaipur City (South), says the team then walked and was hit with bricks, sticks and tubes filled with stones. She named volunteer Surendra, also called Sanju Verma, with a fractured hand, volunteer Salman with injuries across the body, and dust thrown into her own eyes plus a shoulder injury.

Ranka, speaking on camera that day, said windows were smashed, phones broken, a woman assaulted, his shirt torn, and one teammate left with a fractured hand. He gave Education Minister Madan Dilawar 48 hours to arrest those involved and to withdraw the school-entry order, or face a statewide agitation aimed at the minister’s resignation. He also said villagers had asked CJP to come, and that the people who attacked were sent from outside.

At around 9am, Ashutosh Ranka of CJP came to our village with 50-60 people on the pretext of inspecting a school. They started abusing me and the villagers. They also used abusive language against the women of our village; when the villagers and I tried to reason with them, they started beating us.

Bhagwan Sahay Dhanka, Rampura Kanwarpura resident, complaint at Shivdaspura police station

Dhanka’s FIR books Ranka and “50-60” CJP workers for voluntarily causing hurt, wrongful restraint, unlawful assembly and intentional insult, plus three sections of the SC/ST Act. He said they abused villagers with casteist words. CJP’s counter-FIR, on Sharma’s complaint, uses hurt, restraint, unlawful assembly, mischief causing loss between Rs 20,000 and Rs 1 lakh, and intentional insult. Both sides filed on the night of August 21.

CJP later named Lalchand Sharma as the man it says organised the attack and is visible on camera, and said villagers who helped the team pointed to Kamal Pradhan and Shankar Bagda. Ranka alleged the same faces had sat the previous night with the local MLA, Kailash Verma. That remains his claim, not a court finding. Additional Deputy Commissioner of Police Lalit Sharma said complaints had come from both sides and FIRs were registered on that basis.

The blockade on that road was organised enough that people watching the chase footage refused to treat it as a spontaneous village defence. The other reading, equally loud, is that a few dozen outsiders arriving at 9am with cameras looks like a raid, not a parent-teacher meeting. The unsafe shed and the heavy arrival can sit in the same morning.

On August 23, 11 people were detained in Jodhpur after they entered the Gandhi Shanti Pratishthan while Ranka spoke at a seminar titled Shiksha: Nayi peerhi ke sawal, hitting one person outside and shouting “Cockroach Go Back.” DCP Manish Kumar Choudhary said no complaint had been filed in that matter yet. The Rampura cases were already on paper.

611 Government Schools Still Have No Building

The same week as the clash, the government told the Assembly, answering Leader of the Opposition Tikaram Jully, that 611 government schools in Rajasthan have no building of their own. The figure comes from UDISE data for 2025-26 under Samagra Shiksha. Ten of those schools are for girls. Jaipur accounts for 38 of the 611. Among blocks, Aklera in Jhalawar is highest at 23, then Khanpur 16, Jhalrapatan 11, Bap in Phalodi 11 and Chotisarvan in Banswara 10.

Of 64,484 government schools that do have buildings, 2,047 lack toilets and 1,049 lack drinking water. Banswara (188), Dungarpur (124) and Udaipur (98) lead the toilet gap. The government also told the House it had set aside Rs 550 crore for repairs and Rs 450 crore for new buildings for schools with none, or with structures already failing.

RAJASTHAN SCHOOL BUILDING GAPS

Additional Chief Secretary (School Education) Rajesh Yadav, speaking as the Rampura walls came down, said a technical safety audit of 65,308 government schools had produced an action plan of Rs 12,335.90 crore for 2026-27 to 2030-31. He put this year’s spend at Rs 3,000 crore. Inside the five-year sheet he listed Rs 2,487.75 crore for 3,587 new school buildings and Rs 1,129.45 crore for major repairs at 22,589 schools. A committee of civil engineers from IIT-Jodhpur and MNIT Jaipur has already sent IIT-Jodhpur’s report, he said.

Jully, using the same audit in the House, said 3,768 buildings and 83,783 rooms were unsafe and that closing or shifting those schools had hurt enrolment. Ranka put the dilapidated-building count near 3,000 and asked the government to name how many schools it had repaired in six months and which ones it would take up next year. Rampura is one two-room answer to a list that long.

CJP Claims the Origin Story Anyway

On August 22, after the money package landed, Ranka said the party’s immediate demand on Rampura had been met and that the 48-hour warning was over. “We had not gone there to seek votes. We had gone to talk about getting the school fixed,” he said. He still asked why the work had not started earlier, and said there was no justification for the violence. Dipke called the announcement a big victory after the attack on volunteers.

On September 2, with the bulldozer on site, Ranka posted again from the same village. He treated the dust as proof the campaign had worked, and the beating as the price of a classroom.

https://x.com/AshutoshRanka/status/2095034603480506629

Civil Lines MLA Gopal Sharma had already offered the state’s tone on August 21, telling reporters there was “no use of a cockroach inside a house.” Ranka spent the following days needling Dilawar for posting about municipal elections in Ramganj Mandi while children sat near fodder. The minister’s job includes school education and panchayati raj. The feed did not mention Rampura.

Credit is the product CJP actually extracted. A mining-area grant and an MLA top-up were already in the machine. What the visit added was a national origin myth, a 48-hour clock, and a set of videos in which stones, torn cloth and a buffalo shed travel farther than a DMFT sanction order. That is a political skill. It is not the same thing as writing the cheque.

After the Razing, the Inspection Door Stays Shut

The Director of Secondary Education’s August 16 circular, issued the day after School Thik Karo began, tells outsiders to obtain prior approval from the principal before entering a government school, and prior written permission for photography, videography, interviews, audio recording and livestreaming. Uttar Pradesh district basic education officers followed on August 19 in Ayodhya and several other districts, telling YouTubers and social-media users to stay out without competent-authority clearance.

Priya Mishra asked the Supreme Court to strike those curbs down, arguing they hit Articles 14, 19(1)(a), 19(1)(g), 21 and 21-A. Advocate Narendra Mishra mentioned the plea on August 25. On September 3, a bench of Justice P.S. Narasimha and Justice Alok Aradhe declined to hear the Article 32 petition: “We are not inclined to entertain the writ petition filed under Article 32 of the Constitution of India.”

The same day the Rampura walls fell, Ranka was already in Ponk village in Jhunjhunu, inspecting a Mahatma Gandhi school built in 1952 that he said once sent out IAS officers and lieutenant colonels and now stands ruined. He promised another visit, and a sit-in with residents if work had not started. The method travels. The legal room around it shrank in the same fortnight.

Classes Sit in a Neighbour’s House Until the Walls Go Up

Eighteen children and two teachers now work from a vacant house in Rampura Kanwarpura. The cattle enclosure is behind them. The 1985 rooms are rubble. The new two-room block is a line in a sanction, not a roof.

STILL OPEN AFTER THE BULLDOZER

• Finish date: No official deadline has been given for the Rs 18 lakh building.
• Criminal cases: Cross FIRs at Shivdaspura, including SC/ST Act sections against Ranka and dozens of CJP workers, remain on file.
• Who hit whom: CJP names outsiders and BJP workers; Dhanka names the visiting team; police have registered both complaints and have not announced a closed investigation.
• The other 610: UDISE still counts hundreds of government schools with no building of their own, plus thousands without toilets or drinking water.

Ranka said that once a good school is built for the children, the stones will have been worth it. The children will be the last to know if that sentence holds, because they are the ones sitting in a neighbour’s house while adults argue about who paid, who swung, and who gets to film the next inspection.