For 86 years, children have attended a school located inside the sprawling premises of Kymore’s British-era asbestos plant. The school, established in 1940, has now become central to a larger question in the Katni district town: how should a city account for the health impact of industrial exposure when generations of residents passed through a potentially contaminated environment but no consolidated student or disease record exists?
The concern is not based on a finding that the school caused illness. The available account does not establish that link. It does, however, show a potentially significant overlap between the school’s history, the factory’s operations and the asbestos-related compensation claims of Kymore residents. According to people involved in processing claims, most of more than 2,000 Kymore residents who have received compensation for asbestos-linked diseases were former students of the school. A further 300 claims are reportedly under process.
That reported overlap makes the school more than an educational institution. It is also a possible record of how an industrial settlement exposed ordinary public life to a hazardous material over several generations. Yet the number of students who studied there since 1940, their present locations, their occupational histories and their health outcomes have not been consolidated into a public record.
Kymore asbestos exposure and the missing institutional record
The factory was established in Kymore in 1934 by the British company Turner & Newall. Six years later, the school began operating within the plant’s 80-acre premises. The school is now known as Everest-Purva Madhyamik Shala and continues to function under the corporate social responsibility programme of the group operating the factory.
The school was also run by the government for a period, when a principal was appointed and a mid-day meal programme introduced, according to sources cited in the report. Those arrangements were later discontinued. The company had reportedly sought to close the school at one stage, but local residents resisted and sought its continuation.
This institutional history matters because responsibility for a school can be divided across public administration, corporate management and local community structures. If a school operates inside an industrial compound, its students are not necessarily factory workers, but they still share the physical environment. Establishing who was responsible for monitoring air quality, recording exposure, maintaining buildings and tracking health outcomes becomes essential when the suspected effects of exposure may appear decades later.
No such consolidated record is identified in the supplied account. There is no documented count of former students, no list showing where they went after leaving Kymore and no publicly available assessment of how many developed respiratory disease or were screened for asbestos-related conditions. That absence limits the ability of authorities and affected families to understand the scale of the problem.
The gap also affects the meaning of compensation data. A compensation claim can show that a person was recognised as eligible under a particular process, but it does not automatically explain where or when exposure occurred. Former students may also have worked in the plant, lived near waste sites or encountered asbestos through family and neighbourhood contact. Without consistent exposure and health records, it becomes difficult to distinguish these pathways.
What the reported cases show—and what they do not
The experience of one Kymore family illustrates both the seriousness of the concern and the limits of the available evidence. Sarwar Khan’s elder brother, Zabbar Khan, died in 2025. Two other brothers, Ramzan Khan and Anwar Khan, were diagnosed with asbestos-linked diseases, while three sisters—Quresha Begum, Amna Begum and Samita Begum—are reportedly suffering from such diseases and have received compensation claims through the trust handling victims’ cases. Their ages are stated to be between 60 and 70.
All six siblings attended the same school. Sarwar Khan also studied there but says he has not developed a similar infection. This family history does not prove that the school caused the illnesses. It does show why a systematic review of former students could be relevant: people who shared a place of education may have encountered the same surroundings, while their later health outcomes could differ for reasons that remain undocumented.
Dr Murlidhar Venkiteswaran, a Chennai-based doctor involved in screening Kymore patients and assisting with claims, said asbestos exposure can cause asbestosis, mesothelioma and lung cancer. He said the risk was not limited to factory workers and could extend to people living near asbestos factories, mines and waste dumps.
“Environmental exposure is no different from occupational exposure. The difference is only in the level of exposure,” Dr Murlidhar said, according to the report. He added that people living around asbestos mines, waste dumps or buildings containing asbestos could also be exposed. He also said asbestos-related disease could emerge decades after exposure and that the material had been linked to cancers of the larynx, oesophagus and ovary.
These medical observations help explain why the school’s history cannot be assessed only through present-day conditions. A factory operator may state that current operations use modern technology and updated systems, including a bag opening device for handling industrial material. That position addresses present operations. It does not by itself settle questions about historical dust, earlier waste disposal practices or diseases that may emerge after a long latency period.
A school’s exposure history was raised internationally
The issue was raised at the United Nations Forum on Business and Human Rights in Geneva in 2017 by Nirmala Gurung, a teacher and former headmistress of the school. Gurung had never worked inside the asbestos factory, but she was diagnosed with parenchymal asbestosis in 2016.
In her account, documented by organisations that took her to Geneva, Gurung said dry asbestos dust blew into classrooms during the dry season. She recalled parents and children arriving at the school covered in dust and called for the protection of the next generation and proper treatment of asbestos waste dumped in populated areas.
Gurung died in Kymore on September 9, 2020, aged 68. Her testimony places the school within a longer public-health history rather than treating current concerns as a new dispute. It also raises a basic administrative question: when a teacher reports dust entering classrooms and later develops an asbestos-linked disease, which authority is expected to investigate the school environment and preserve the evidence?
The reported absence of a consolidated record suggests that this question was not resolved in a way that created an accessible institutional history. As staff, students and residents move away, the information needed to reconstruct exposure becomes harder to gather. Medical records may remain with separate hospitals, compensation documents may be held by trusts and employment histories may sit with different agencies.
The national data problem behind Kymore
The Kymore case also reflects a broader concern raised by the Occupational and Environmental Health Network of India, a Delhi-based coalition of victim groups, trade unions, civil society organisations and labour advocates. Its coordinator, Jagdish Patel, said India lacked reliable national data on asbestos-related disease.
Patel said India continued to consume asbestos in large quantities despite depending entirely on imports because asbestos is not mined domestically. He also said more than 70 countries, including Nepal, had completely banned asbestos, while India had not done so. These claims are presented as part of the network’s position and are not independently established by the supplied report.
Patel further criticised India’s position on chrysotile asbestos and said the country had not agreed to include chrysotile in the schedule of the Rotterdam Convention, which requires informed consent by the buyer. He also raised concerns about how asbestos safety is presented at the Directorate General Factory Advice Service and Labour Institutes’ permanent safety exhibition in Mumbai.
The point is not only whether asbestos is permitted or prohibited. It is also whether public institutions can measure disease, trace exposure and inform communities about risks. Patel said Dr Raja Singh of Delhi had used RTI applications to obtain mesothelioma figures from different cancer hospitals and found large numbers of cases, but that the government did not have a consolidated picture of the disease burden.
Kymore’s missing school record fits into that larger data gap. If national agencies do not maintain a complete picture of asbestos-linked disease, local authorities may lack the guidance, funding or administrative systems needed to identify high-risk settlements and former institutions. Families then have to navigate diagnosis, compensation and documentation through fragmented channels.
## The larger urban governance question
Kymore is not a conventional metropolitan pollution story. It is a smaller industrial town in which a factory, a school, residential life and long-term public health became closely connected. Such places often have fewer specialised health facilities and less administrative capacity than large cities, even when their industrial legacy is significant.
The school’s location also shows why environmental risk cannot be assessed only at the boundary of a factory. Children, teachers, families and nearby residents may encounter industrial hazards through air, dust, buildings, waste or household contact. The absence of a formal factory job does not necessarily answer whether a person shared an exposure environment.
At the same time, the available evidence does not establish the number of people affected by exposure at the school, nor does it prove that each reported illness among former students originated there. Those questions require medical records, exposure histories, environmental assessments and an authoritative review of compensation documents.
What the Kymore account confirms is narrower but important: a school has operated for decades inside an asbestos factory’s premises; residents and former school staff have raised concerns about historical dust and exposure; more than 2,000 residents have reportedly received compensation for asbestos-linked diseases; around 300 further claims are under process; and no consolidated account of the school’s former students and health outcomes has been identified.
The next step, therefore, is not to convert an incomplete record into a definitive causal claim. It is to determine whether the record can be completed. The future of the school, the preservation of former student and worker information, the screening of affected communities and the handling of historical asbestos waste remain the key questions for authorities, health institutions and the company operating the factory.
