New Delhi: The Delhi government has decided to withhold the salary increment of school principals for failing to conduct a cleaning drive in their schools despite warnings.

Deputy Chief Minister and education minister of Delhi Manish Sisodia on Friday said to reporters that some 150 of the 1,000 government schools did not follow government instruction to clean their premises.

"Of these schools, some of them were very dirty. We have decided not to give increment to these principals for two years".

"I had given all schools a deadline to clean the premises. I even asked them to hire labour to do that," Sisodia said.

"We made 225 teams, each having four people, who surveyed all the school buildings. We observed that many schools did good work, but 15-20 percent didn't work at all. They took it casually," he said, adding that people would have to be roped in to ensure cleanliness.

"We are developing an app through which people would be able to click the picture of garbage in schools and report to us," said Sisodia, adding that the government had identified about 30 acres of land to build a model school village.

"This will be in northeast Delhi. About 10 schools of different streams will be built there".

He also spoke about measures in field education like building 8,000 classrooms in the existing schools and building another 25 by next year.

Sisodia said he was thinking of adopting the European countries' education model in Delhi schools. (Inputs from IANS)