TRS chief slams Telangana government’s education policy as chaotic and anti-poor
Kalvakuntla Kavitha, president of the Telangana Rashtra Samithi, launched a blistering attack on Chief Minister Revanth Reddy on Monday, accusing him of deliberately pushing poor children and girls away from education through his government’s controversial plan to shut down thousands of state-run schools.
Releasing a video statement, Kavitha didn’t mince her words. She said Revanth Reddy is worse than Hitler — and then went a step further, calling him a Taliban. Her reason? The Chief Minister’s recent announcement that the government intends to reduce 27,000 existing government schools down to just 4,000.
“This isn’t school consolidation. This is an attack on the poor,” she said. “When you close a school in a village, you’re not merging it — you’re ending a child’s dream.”
A Department in Disarray
Kavitha’s sharpest criticism wasn’t just about the school closures. She pointed to what she described as a complete breakdown of functioning within the education department — a series of contradictions and administrative failures that she says have left students and parents confused and anxious.
The most glaring example, she argued, came just days ago. The Chief Minister publicly declared that intermediate admissions would not proceed this year — only for the Inter Board to open its admission portal the very next morning. No clarification followed. No correction was issued.
Junior colleges, she noted, have been running for nearly a week now, yet neither government nor private institutions have received their official affiliations from the state. The colleges are functioning in a legal grey zone, and no one in authority seems particularly concerned.
Degree admissions have descended into what she called outright confusion. The Higher Education Council recommended one set of courses. The Higher Education Commissionerate put forward a different list. Universities have approved neither. Yet the DOST admission process continues to move forward, apparently independent of any of this.
Deaths in Gurukuls Go Unaddressed
Among the most serious allegations Kavitha raised was the death of over a hundred students in residential Gurukul schools — a figure she cited while pointing out that the Chief Minister has not called a single review meeting on the matter. No accountability, no inquiry, no public acknowledgment.
Fee Reimbursement Crisis and GO No. 7
Kavitha also zeroed in on the government’s handling of fee reimbursement, saying that over Rs 11,000 crore in dues owed to students remains unpaid. Rather than clearing this backlog, the government introduced GO No. 7 — a move that she argues effectively hands private colleges a licence to overcharge students directly.
She called for GO No. 7 to be scrapped immediately, and demanded that the Fee Regulation Act be enforced without further delay to prevent what she described as systematic exploitation of students by private institutions.
The Bigger Picture
What comes through Kavitha’s statement is a portrait of a government she believes has lost its grip on one of the most critical sectors it oversees. Whether one agrees with her politics or not, the specific failures she raises — the inter admission U-turn, the missing affiliations, the degree course deadlock — are verifiable and documented.
The question now is whether the Revanth Reddy government will respond with policy clarity, or allow the confusion in the education sector to deepen further as the academic year gets underway.
