The 2004 Kumbakonam school fire happened in a school in Kumbakonam in the Thanjavur district of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. On 16 July 2004, 94 students from the Krishna English Medium School's primary section were killed after the school's thatched roof caught fire. The accident was one of the four most significant fire accidents, the most significant school accident in the history of Tamil Nadu, and the second-largest school fire in India in terms of casualties after the Dabwali fire accident.
A committee set up under retired Judge Sampath found out that the heavy casualties were due to the management's tactics to admit extra students to a primary school in order to mislead the authorities about the student-teacher ratio. The Chief Minister, who visited the site, ordered the withdrawal of the recognition of the three schools, prosecution of the school authorities and the correspondent, and the suspension of the Chief Educational Officer, the District Elementary Educational Officer, and the Assistant Elementary Educational Officer of the Thanjavur school district.
A compensation of 1,000,000 was provided to the next of the kin of the deceased, 25,000 to the severely injured, and 10,000 to other injured victims from the Chief Minister’s Public Relief Fund. The district administration arranged another primary school in Natham village and accommodated 46 students under the government's Educational Guarantee Scheme.
After a long delay, a trial began on 24 September 2012 in the Thanjavur district court. The case had 21 accused and 488 witnesses, including 18 children who survived the fire. The headmaster Prabharan and three others were charged in the case, along with Pulavar Palanichamy, his wife and correspondent of the school Saraswati, three teachers, six officers of the Elementary Education Department, the Kumbakonam Municipal Commissioner, the town planning officer, and four assistants of the education department. On 30 July 2014, the court sentenced the school founder Pulavar Palanichamy to life imprisonment and fined him 5,165,700. Eight others, including school staff and officials from Kumbakonam and the state education department, were sentenced to five years imprisonment, and another to two years imprisonment. Eleven of those accused, including three teachers, were acquitted.
Background
There were three schools, namely, Sri Krishna Aided Primary School, Saraswathy Nursery and Primary School, and Sri Krishna Girls High School, operating in the same building in Kasiraman street in Kumbakonam, a town in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu. The school was located amidst residential buildings, away from the main road. The school had a small gate wide, immediately beyond which the classrooms were located. The classrooms did not have any partition, and there was a stage at the end of the classroom. On the northwest side of the stage were the noon meal kitchen and a cycle stand, both of which were thatched structures. The northern wing in the ground floor accommodated the Saraswathy Nursery and Primary School, which had six classes, one each for LKG (Lower Kinter Garden), UKG (Upper Kinter Garden), I, II, IV, and V. There was another entrance to the school on the eastern side.
The buildings in the nursery and primary schools had no ventilation. Near the eastern entrance, there was a narrow staircase wide leading to the first floor of the building. The layout of the first floor was similar to the ground floor, where classes had no separation, and the exit was through a narrow collapsible door. The lower end of the class on the western side was connected to the noon meal kitchen thatched roof and the cycle stand roof, where the accident occurred. The Sri Krishna Girls High School had 179, Sri Krishna Aided Primary School had 477, and Saraswathy Nursery and Primary School had 126 students in their roles, totaling 782 students in the three schools. The second floor measured * and had classes for standards VI, VII, VIII, and IX of the girls' high school. The third floor had an open terrace having a water tank.