00:02 COMM: The first day in class is a daunting
prospect, so imagine being one of the 47,000 pupils on the register of the world's biggest
school.
00:11 COMM: City Montessori in Lucknow, India, is
so large that no venue is big enough to hold an entire school assembly.
Dr. Jagdish Gandhi has the unenviable task of presiding over the twenty campus school,
which has been recognised by Guinness World Records.
00:28 JAGDISH: I founded this school with only five
children, and that too I got with great difficulty.
So from word of mouth it spread, and slowly and slowly children have started coming in.
and year after year the numbers swelled.
It has twenty campuses in the city of Lucknow.
Even in a small town the population isn't as big as 47,000.
00:51 COMM: For fourteen year old like Kanika Gupta
being one of thousands of students at CNS has it's ups and downs.
00:58 KANIKA: I would certainly say that all schools
are good but CMS, I would not think of leaving it, I would not imagine leaving it.
01:06 COMM: Lessons in the schools 1,000 plus classrooms
may look fairly familiar, but the subjects taught often aren't.
01:14 COMM: Alongside geography, history and English,
classes of up to 47 pupils are also taught messages of universal peace.
Miss Archana Misha is one of two thousand five hundred teachers charged with sharing
this unique message with students.
01:28 ARCHANA: I've been a part of CMS for the last
six years, teaching is not so easy nowadays because we are dealing with the generation
which is hi-fi, hi-tech, they know everything, they know about everything, sometimes they
even know more than us.
We give them extra classes, supposedly you're not able to give attention to any particular
child.
01:50 COMM: Everything about CMS is big, it has
4,000 staff, around thirty thousand computers, and goes through thousands of pounds worth
of stationary each year.
The daily fifteen minute lunch break is no less chaotic.
02:05 COMM: Each day at ten forty AM, up to 12,000
pupils swirl the school's tiny canteen area, scoffing hundreds of vegetable patties and
burgers.
02:15 COMM: And out on the sports field, preceding
to have an element of military pomp to them.
Egg and spoon races are ditched, in favour of human pyramids and sack races.
02:25 JAGDISH: I never realised it was going to
become so big.
It was a very proud moment for us when the Guinness Book of Records included this school,
it was 1999 at the time we only had 22,000 children, but now the number has been more
than doubled.
02:41 COMM: Despite already being the world's biggest,
City Montessori's growth doesn't look like slowing up.