Telangana schools promote cheating, prepare food next to washrooms, report finds

Hyderabad: For fourteen months, a commission appointed by the Telangana government moved through classrooms, hostels, regulatory offices, and private colleges across the state. Its investigators visited 305 institutions in all 33 districts. They also travelled to Malaysia, Vietnam, and the United States before submitting their final report to Chief Minister A. Revanth Reddy on February 26, 2026.

What they describe is not an episodic breakdown. It is a system that has learned to perform education rather than deliver it.

At one end, government schools manipulate internal assessments. At another, children in residential institutions queue at 3:00 a.m. for access to washrooms. Official data lists tens of thousands of libraries and computers. Field visits reveal empty rooms, locked cupboards, and machines that do not work.

The report connects these threads into a single diagnosis: structure without substance.

`Malpractice’ as an assessment strategy

The commission does not describe isolated cheating incidents. It documents a pattern.

“Schools know what scores, aggregates, and improvements over baselines the authorities would like to see and game the assessments, including, shockingly, by promoting malpractice during exams, to deliver just that.”

The word “shockingly” appears in the report itself for the word malpractice; in common man language, it’s cheating.

Schools are judged by the results that they internally generate. That circular structure, the commission suggests, has encouraged performance over pedagogy.

Internal assessments have become “perfunctory and performative at once”, conducted as a compliance exercise and scored to satisfy administrative pressure. The data travels upward. The classroom remains unchanged.

The learning benchmark exposes the gap. In Class V, just 29.3% of children in government schools can read a text written for Class II. Telangana ranked 29th nationally in the Performance Grading Index in 2022–23. “Learning outcomes remained stagnant at 36.6 across both years, and governance processes declined sharply from 58.1 to 44.7.”

The gap between records and reality

If one were to rely on official datasets, the state’s infrastructure footprint would appear substantial.

UDISE records 40,966 school libraries, reading corners, or book banks across Telangana. Commission members visited schools carrying those figures.

What they encountered was different

“Most government schools do not have a library; in fact, not even 100 government schools in the state have a functional library; in the name of book bank, a pile of textbooks is usually locked up in a bureau in a corner of a classroom, seldom accessible to the students.”

The same pattern extends to digital infrastructure. UDISE shows 37,095 computers in schools. The commission found that “computer labs are non-existent and where they exist, are mostly dysfunctional.”

The state has been counting assets that either do not function or do not exist in usable form. The issue, the report implies, is not clerical error but systemic drift toward reporting compliance rather than delivery.

Residential institutions under strain

Telangana operates 1,855 residential institutions housing 7.45 lakh children. These campuses are intended to provide structured learning environments for students from vulnerable backgrounds.

In many of these institutions, sanitation facilities are insufficient.

“Because there are too many students and too few washrooms, children are forced to wake up as early as 3:00 a.m. just to bathe or wash clothes. This routine leads to constant sleep deprivation and mental stress.”

Nearly 40% of residential institutions function from rented or makeshift premises “lacking basic safety features, adequate classrooms, laboratories, sanitation facilities, and secure residential spaces.”

For adolescent girls, the shortcomings become more acute. The commission records the absence of private bathing areas, sanitary napkin dispensers, and incinerators. It links these deficits to anaemia, infection,s and difficulty concentrating in class.

The report also situates residential education within broader social indicators. It notes that 24% of women aged 20–24 in Telangana were married before the legal age. Junior colleges, despite enrolling students within this age bracket, have not been formally integrated into child marriage prevention mechanisms. “Not involving junior colleges in child marriage prevention,” the report states, “is a significant policy gap.”

Meals prepared in unsafe environments

The mid-day meal programme, a core welfare intervention, appears in the report not as a uniform success but as a site of uneven implementation.

“In many instances, food is prepared in open spaces, under trees, inside or adjacent to classrooms, near washrooms, or within cramped and poorly ventilated sheds.”

Field observations recorded physical contaminants such as pebbles, stones, metal, glass, insects, and hair. Biological contaminants included bacteria, mould, viruses, and parasites. Utensils were found damaged and rusted. Storage facilities showed rodent infestation.

The women cooking these meals reported delayed payments at rates below market price.

Every day, 7.45 lakh children consume food prepared under these conditions.

Teacher preparation without capacity

Behind classroom outcomes lies the teacher training ecosystem. The commission’s findings suggest that it operates with severe capacity deficits.

Of 286 sanctioned posts in the District Institutes of Education and Training, only 16 are filled. “A working strength of just 5.59%.” SCERT, the apex academic body for school education, carries approximately 70% vacancies.

These institutions are tasked with designing curricula, training teachers, and maintaining academic standards. With most posts vacant, oversight and support remain thin.

Private teacher education colleges show parallel weaknesses. After visiting two institutions in Ranga Reddy district, the commission reported: “The Commission found that the colleges exist largely on paper, with no regular classes, absent staff, missing academic records, and deserted premises; during examinations, non-faculty invigilators, delayed question papers, inadequate supervision, and fraudulent record entries were noticed.”

These colleges supply new entrants to the teaching workforce.

Meanwhile, even active teachers face structural constraints. A joint study by the University of Hyderabad, UNICEF, and Samagra Shiksha measured actual instructional time. “The average teaching time available to a teacher is just 3 hours per day, often fragmented into 15–20 minute intervals. This means that more than half of the workday is consumed by non-teaching responsibilities.”

Administrative paperwork, meal monitoring, and reporting obligations absorb the remainder.

The parallel economy of aspiration

Outside the government system, the commission turned to Telangana’s corporate junior colleges.

After the IIT JEE 2025 results, investigators collected full-page newspaper advertisements published by multiple institutions. Several colleges claimed credit for the same 11 top-ranking students.

“The same eleven children, reproduced across competing institutions, each presenting the same photograph and rank as evidence of its own excellence.”

“As a result of such advertisements, lakhs of unsuspecting parents rush in to enrol their children in corporate institutions, often at very high fees, in the hope that such coaching will pave the path for their children securing a seat in IITs.”

Fees range from ₹3 lakh to ₹6 lakh for two years of integrated IIT-JEE or NEET preparation, excluding hostel, food, and transport.

What is not disclosed is “the ratio of students succeeding in competitive exams to the total students enrolled. This is not disclosed for the simple reason that the number of successful students constitutes a very small proportion of the total students enrolled, sometimes as low as less than 1%.”

Students paying identical fees are internally stratified into batches based on entrance tests. “Faculty members coaching students enrolled in lower batches do not tend to be of the same calibre as those engaged in coaching the top batches.” Neither students nor parents are routinely informed of this differentiation.

“The business model of this industry, worth thousands of crores of rupees,” the commission states, “is maximising revenue through the number of admissions. The success of a few top rankers is used to sell the dreams of success in IITs/NEET to lakhs of trusting parents in Telangana.”

Governance and political hesitations

The commission closes by examining not infrastructure but decision-making.

“Governments have been hesitant to insist on such dedication from the teaching community due to its significant political influence.”

“Government decisions are often shaped by one or two administrative officers who opt for quick administrative fixes for complex academic problems, sometimes causing lasting harm to educational institutions and society.”

“Governments too sometimes view education merely as another department to manage, rather than recognising its special role in building a vibrant society.”

The recommendations are extensive: abolishing EAPCET and allocating engineering admissions based on Class 12 marks; advocating centrally for the cancellation of NEET; merging the SSC and Intermediate boards; mandating disclosure of coaching centre success ratios; and requiring IAS officers posted to education leadership roles to serve a minimum of five years.

The government has confirmed it read the report and accepted the recommendations.

The commission has completed its work. It has documented inflated records, strained hostels, unsafe kitchens, understaffed training bodies, and a private coaching market built on selective visibility.

What remains is the harder task of turning acknowledgement into structural change.