The Telangana People’s Front (TPF) 12-day Vidya Bus Yatra, which toured various districts from September 15 to highlight concerns facing the education sector, reached its final leg on Saturday with the bus reaching Gabbilalpet Government School.
The TPF team interacted with parents of students and held a badi nidra as part of the programme on Saturday night.
The primary school at Gabbilalpet in Jawaharnagar, Medchal-Malkajgiri, operates from rented premises. The school was secured through the sustained struggle of parents over the past four years and is the only government school serving the area’s population of around 50,000.
On Sunday, TPF held a round-table discussion with students, activists and NGOs on the state of school education. Participants called for targeted measures to strengthen public education and regulate the rising costs of private education.
A first-generation learner from Jawaharnagar, Kavya, who completed her schooling at a ZPHS school, said children in the basti “must not grow up feeling like second-class citizens”.
TPF member M.V. Reddy stressed that education enables individuals to reach high positions in society and said the All-India Services were not necessarily limited to candidates from elite backgrounds. On the demand for land for a Telangana Public School in Gabbilalpet, he said a negotiated solution must be found.
TPF member Champalal said education and healthcare were essential needs and termed it shameful that citizens continued to struggle for basic education 80 years after Independence. He cited Telangana Public School, Arutla, as an example of how government schools could provide full facilities and create opportunities for first-generation learners.
MV Foundation’s Venkat Reddy said the proliferation of private schools was enabled by successive governments without adequate standards or regulation.
According to TPF leader and former Telangana Education Commission chairperson Akunuri Murali, school education is in a dire need of revival. He said an additional allocation of ₹ 6,000 crore annually for five years would be a small portion of Telangana’s ₹ 3.24 lakh crore annual budget, and called for a groundswell of demand from parents.
