“REPAIR and renovation are a continuous process and as and when required, funds are being provided by the department to repair damaged classrooms. Safety audits of school infrastructure are also held at regular intervals to identify dilapidated classrooms and take corrective measures for safety of students.”
Quoted verbatim from the August 19, 2026 Times of India report on the subject on page 3, a statement given by the commissioner-cum-secretary of the Department of School and Mass Education. Stonewalling at its best. Insensitive at its worst.
This was in response to reports about 80 children of Utkalamani Smaraki UP School in Cuttack’s Khan Nagar being forced to attend classes in a cramped ward office after their six-decade-old school building was rendered unsafe because of its dilapidated condition. The school actually has 220 students but only 80 are attending classes because the ward office and the staircase can accommodate only that many. The rest are on a blissful holiday.
The response of the departmental secretary actually could have been machine generated. It’s a statement that can be repeated ad nauseam every time some hapless reporter bothers to ask questions about the sorry state of government school infrastructure. Most media prefer not to ask, keeping the bountiful advertisement revenues accruing from the state government in mind. The children and their future be damned. A school in memory of Utkalamani Gopabandhu doesn’t fit into the government’s vision of Odia Asmita perhaps.
The newspaper report has many takeaways. Khan Nagar is barely 30 minutes’ drive from the hallowed precincts of the Lok Seva Bhavan, the seat of power. Any conscientious officer would have rushed to the site and reviewed the situation first-hand, done a quick inquiry and taken steps to fix responsibility and make amends. But no. These officials are busy. There are seminars and symposiums and meetings galore. Every such occasion demands that PowerPoint presentations gloating over Odisha’s march towards becoming “the Education Hub of East Coast” have to be manufactured, glossy brochures made, and self-congratulatory statements for the press prepared; apart from the orchids, silk angavastras for the VIPs and sumptuous lunch afterwards.
Fine, the least some official can do is do a video call, see the conditions and ask a few questions. When was the building last inspected as part of the flaunted safety audit? Who inspected? What report was generated? Were repairs funding sought? Who sat over the file if a demand was generated?
But who is interested in the truth? Not the high officials. Their children go to swanky private schools and then university abroad. They have no stakes in repairing dilapidated government school and college buildings. Building new ones is another matter. It involves big budget, big contracts and big grease money.
Just to recollect, the government in September 2025 approved an outlay of Rs 12,000 crore to set up 2,200 primary schools under the Godabarish Adarsha Vidyalaya (GAV) scheme in three years from 2025-26. When the state cannot run existing schools with adequate teachers and functional infrastructure, why thousands of new schools?
If new schools are indeed required to be constructed in each Panchayat, why were over 20,000 schools closed down between 2020 and 2023 due to lack of adequate students? Back in December 2023, the Union ministry of education informed the Lok Sabha that as many as 1,898 government schools in the state of Odisha were functioning with just a single classroom and almost 20,000 schools state-wide don’t have basic classroom furniture, no desks, no benches. So thousands of children end up sitting on the floor during lessons. As per the UDISE report of 2023-24, about 2,182 schools in the state including 1,672 government schools did not have electricity. But those 20,000 schools without desks must languish. That work is not glamorous. They cannot be announced with fanfare in a big government function from a rostrum adorned with orchids.
But things are unlikely to be business as usual either for the bureaucrats or their political bosses. Interestingly, on August 22, 2026, the Rajasthan government issued formal financial approval for a comprehensive Rs 12,500-crore, three-year infrastructure roadmap for government school repair project. 45,365 government school buildings in Rajasthan have been identified as needing major repairs and 611 schools still functioning without buildings.
Specifically, it sanctioned Rs.18 lakhs to construct a new building for Government Primary School Rampura in Sanganer Block. This decisive administrative order came shortly after volunteers from the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) visited the site. The group claimed the educational facility had been operating inside a local cattle enclosure due to crumbling infrastructure.
The hapless citizen may have finally found cockroaches useful for a change. Cockroaches thrive in dirty, dark, cluttered spaces. They get attracted to food residues, moisture, and shelter. Good housekeeping is necessary to keep them at bay. That a cockroach was parachuted from Boston, US to lead the ilk in Janatar Mantar and force the resignation of the Union Education Minister shouldn’t be dismissed as just conspiracy by external anti-India forces. The ideal breeding ground, fertile for cockroaches to thrive, has been ready and waiting for long.
While on schools, it is inevitable to recollect the fanfare with which then Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik inaugurated hundreds of transformed schools under 5T initiative of the state government in the run-up to elections. June 2024 elections were consequential for Odisha. The election saw a deeply entrenched ruling party that lorded over the state for 24 years bite the dust.
Two years down the line, the impression may be that the election hasn’t even caused a ripple, for the common man or for the state. The “Double Engine Sarkar” has gone on a renaming, repainting and re-packaging spree. Mission Shakti is now Subhadra Yojana, Mo Bus is Ama Bus. SITI Odisha (State Institute for Transformative Initiatives) has replaced the State Planning Board, to provide a forward-looking, strategic, and data-driven framework for governance and development planning. Sounds familiar? 5T also had the vision of transformation in the functioning of government agencies and departments leveraging technology. The words have been cleverly jumbled, not so deceptively.
Attend a few government functions, seminars and symposiums and you cannot be faulted for getting an impression that VikasitOdisha@2036 has already been delivered, ten years ahead of time. Propaganda over performance, hubris over hard work; the government had made its choices clear. What is the voters’ choice?
