An audit report has found that 150 national schools and seven National Colleges of Education suffered damage exceeding Rs. 2.27 billion in Cyclone Ditwah, Daily Mirror reported.
The Engineering Division of the Ministry of Education put the total at Rs. 2,274,230,000 — a figure precise to the rupee, which indicates a completed institution-by-institution assessment rather than an estimate.
The finding is the omission, not the number
The audit’s substantive criticism is not the scale of the damage but its treatment: the losses “had not been recognised or disclosed in the relevant financial statements.”
A Rs. 2.27 billion impairment to public assets that does not appear in the accounts is invisible to Parliament, to the Treasury allocating reconstruction money, and to anyone reading the ministry’s statements to judge the condition of the school estate. The damage was measured and then left off the books.
A division already behind on delivery
The same report places the omission next to the Engineering Division’s construction record. The division is responsible for infrastructure at schools, National Colleges of Education, teacher training colleges and other educational institutions nationwide.
Rs. 8,432.29 million was allocated for 41 construction projects in 2025. Of those:
- 10 planned activities were not implemented at all
- 16 recorded physical progress below 50%
That is 26 of 41 projects — roughly six in ten — either unstarted or under halfway through the year. The cyclone damage now lands on a division that was already not delivering its existing programme.
Ditwah’s running bill
The Rs. 2.27 billion is the education sector’s share alone, and it adds to a national recovery cost that has been accumulating across sectors since the cyclone — from housing reconstruction to the humanitarian response reviewed earlier this month. No consolidated national damage figure for Ditwah has been published.
Not reported
Daily Mirror does not identify which audit body produced the report — the Auditor General’s Department is the usual author of such findings, but it is not named — or give the period the audit covers. It does not name the damaged schools, break the Rs. 2.27 billion down by province or by type of damage, or say how many pupils are affected.
Most importantly, it does not say whether any reconstruction funding has been allocated, whether repairs have begun, or how many of the 150 schools are still operating in damaged buildings. Nor does it record any response from the Ministry of Education to the non-disclosure finding.
