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Hyderabad: The Telangana Education Commission, set up to draft a comprehensive policy covering everything from pre-primary to university level, including technical education, submitted its report to Chief Minister A Revanth Reddy on February 26. The commission spent 14 months on the exercise, visiting 305 institutions across all 33 districts, convening multiple rounds of stakeholder consultations and undertaking both inter-state and international study visits before arriving at its findings.
What those findings reveal is a public education system that has been, in more ways than one, hollowing itself out.
Private school enrolment in the state has crossed 60 per cent, up from around 40 per cent in 2013-14. Government school enrolment, meanwhile, has fallen by more than 40 per cent and dropped to just 26 per cent of class 1 students in 2024-25.
The commission traces this shift to declining budget allocations. From 10.9 per cent of state expenditure in 2014-15, the education budget fell to 5.9 per cent in 2021-22, recovering only partially to 7.55 per cent by 2024-25.
One of the commission’s major observations concerns the integrity of internal assessments. It found that institutions across the state have taken to “decontextualised number-chasing.” Internal assessments have become “perfunctory and performatory,” the commission says.
Perfunctory, it said, because they are carried out as a regulatory formality without serving their actual purpose of providing feedback to either student or teacher. Performatory, because schools have learned to read what scores, aggregates and improvements the authorities expect, and then work backwards, including by promoting malpractice during exams, to produce those numbers.
The original purpose of assessment has been systematically inverted, the commission said.
The report says that the midday meal programme, one of the flagship welfare interventions in government schools, is badly run down. Unit costs are set well below actual market prices, and the Self-Help Group (SHG) cooks who run the scheme on the ground often wait up to a year for their bills to be reimbursed.
Many schools have no kitchen infrastructure at all. Food is cooked in open spaces or cramped sheds, with massive contamination risks. Storage conditions are so poor that rodent infestations have been documented. The utensils are rusted. Drinking water is not reliably potable. Rice supply is inconsistent in quality.
Then, there is what the commission called “menu monotony” – meals consisting largely of rice and diluted sambar, with minimal vegetable content. Even the centralised kitchen model has run into problems. Meals prepared early in the morning and transported to schools arrive cold by noon. Some agencies have taken to leaving out basic ingredients such as onions and garlic entirely, producing food that offers children little reason to eat.
The commission’s recommendations on this front are detailed. A revised, standardised and nutritionally balanced menu with regular inclusion of vegetables, dal, eggs and fruits. A substantial upward revision of unit costs to reflect what things actually cost. An extension of the mid-day meal scheme to Intermediate students.
It also called for mandatory use of potable drinking water, gas replacing firewood, SS 304 grade stainless steel utensils, proper storage systems, scientifically designed kitchens and strict personal hygiene protocols for cooks. The commission estimated that additional annual financial outlay required for this would be around Rs 200 crore.
As of 2025, most government schools in Telangana begin at Class 1. Nursery, lower kindergarten (LKG) and upper kindergarten (UKG, which research shows are foundational, are effectively left to the private sector. Families who can afford private school fees get their children an early start. Those who cannot are already behind before formal schooling has even begun.
The state’s Anganwadi Centres exist, but the commission was clear about their limits. Education is only one component of a broader welfare mandate at these centres, and they operate under significant constraints such as inadequate space, mixed-age classrooms and personnel who are not specifically trained in early childhood education.
The commission recommended formally integrating pre-primary education within the School Education Department, attaching Nursery-to-UKG sections to existing primary schools and appointing qualified, trained preschool teachers and child-care assistants.
The commission placed considerable emphasis on English-medium education, describing it as a key driver of both parental trust and student future-readiness in government schools. It recommended early and sustained exposure to the language, with listening and speaking integrated into daily classroom practice rather than treated as peripheral. In teacher recruitment, the commission called for prioritising not just subject competence and pedagogical skill but English language proficiency specifically.
The commission also pushed back against the tendency to treat co-curricular and extracurricular activities as optional extras. Sports, arts, cultural programmes, life skills and socio-emotional learning, it said, must be treated as essential to a student’s holistic development, not as additions to be dropped when the timetable gets tight.
On inclusion, the commission made a pointed recommendation that Telangana implement Section 12(1)(c) of the Right to Education Act, which requires unaided private schools to reserve 25 per cent of their seats for students from economically weaker sections and disadvantaged groups. The provision exists in national law. Telangana has yet to enforce it in any meaningful way.
At the Intermediate level, the commission found a system oriented almost entirely towards competitive entrance examinations, at the cost of most everything else. Nearly 95 per cent of students are enrolled in just three streams of MPC (mathematics, physics, chemistry), BPC (biology, physics, chemistry) and CEC (commerce, economics, civics), while a large number of other general courses attract negligible enrolment.
Vocational education, which could offer a genuine alternative pathway, remains limited and concentrated in a handful of courses. Infrastructure in both government and private junior colleges is poor. Functional science and computer labs are largely absent and libraries are thin. In many corporate junior colleges, there is no time or space set aside for sports or co-curricular activities. Students from rural areas who migrate for education often find themselves in substandard hostel conditions.
Government junior colleges, which serve predominantly rural and marginalised students, are in worse shape still with dilapidated buildings, inadequate classrooms and poor sanitation. Teachers are routinely pulled into administrative and non-teaching duties because of staff shortages. Structured psychosocial counselling and career guidance mechanisms are, the report noted, largely absent.
“Pedagogically, intermediate education has become excessively oriented towards competitive entrance examinations,” the commission said. “Teaching practices prioritise speed, pattern recognition and rote strategies aimed at ‘cracking’ exams rather than developing conceptual understanding or intellectual depth,” it added.
Telangana has 1,855 residential institutions, enrolling over 7.45 lakh students and employing more than 36,000 teachers across multiple welfare societies. But nearly 40 per cent of these institutions are running out of rented or makeshift premises, many without basic safety features, proper classrooms, laboratories or sanitation.
The commission flagged the absence of structured psychosocial support across these institutions and the over-reliance on untrained teaching staff to manage what are, in a residential setting, complex emotional responsibilities. It linked this directly to student distress and, in some cases, suicides.
The commission described education not as a departmental responsibility to be managed within budget constraints, but as a “foundational public good that shapes the quality of citizenship, equity of opportunity, productivity of the workforce, and cohesion of society.”
For a state like Telangana, which carries within it significant socio-economic and regional disparities, the retreat from public education is not an administrative choice. It is, the commission implied, a decision with consequences for who get to participate in the state’s future and on what terms.
This post was last modified on March 4, 2026 2:43 pm