Singh is what he is today to a large extent because of the foresight of his mother Anjuli Bawa, who runs the country’s first online website ‘Action Dyslexia Delhi — Beyond Education’ to help parents of children with learning disability. But Singh is lucky that his mother probed deep enough to learn more about her son’s “fear of reading” — he was also the first student to get concessions from CBSE during his Board exams over a decade ago. But this is not the case for 22 lakh children in schools run by the Municipal Corporation of Delhi and the Delhi government.

On Wednesday, the government and MCD were left looking for answers when a High Court division bench of Chief Justice A P Shah and Justice S Muralidhar asked them if there was a prevalent mechanism to identify dyslexic children in government-run schools. The court found that the schools hardly kept any medical records of students.

“Dyslexia is difficult to identify unlike other disorders. Why are there no special or trained doctors to identify or help dyslexic students?” the Bench asked. “Imagine the state of these children if they are unable to cope with the mainstream.”

MCD runs 1,800 schools; the state government runs approximately another 1,000.

“MCD has 67 full-time doctors plus nurses and assistants available for its schools; what are they doing?” the Bench asked. The court directed both MCD and the government to submit a detailed report on various disabilities detected among students — “class-wise, school-wise”.

“One to two per cent children in every school in Delhi is severely dyslexic. Four to five per cent in every school has other learning disability,” Dr Roma Kumar, senior consultant and clinical psychologist with Sir Ganga Ram Hospital, said.

But she said it would be impossible to spot a dyslexic child before the age of six or seven.

Defending the government, counsel Najimi Waziri said, “We do have specially trained teachers focussed on integrating special children into the mainstream. There is also a Disability Commission for Delhi to devise special schemes for such children.”