Published Sep 10, 2026 | 7:05 AM ⚊ Updated Sep 10, 2026 | 7:05 AM
Student activists said they wanted a complete overhaul of any policies that borrow from the NEP 2020. (Representational image/iStock)
Synopsis: Telangana Chief Minister A Revanth Reddy announced on Teachers’ Day that a new education policy will be rolled out in the state. But over the last few years, the Congress administration has implemented several recommendations and reforms from the National Education Policy 2020, officially and behind the scenes, amid opposition from students and education activists. This contrasts with the position adopted by other southern states like Tamil Nadu and Keralam, whose leaders have formally rejected the controversial policy.
Chief Minister A Revanth Reddy has announced that Telangana will implement a new education policy soon. He said the government is taking up major initiatives to provide quality education, skill training, and innovation.
However, the Congress-ruled state has already started the gradual rollout of the controversial National Education Policy (NEP) introduced by the Union government in 2020.
While other southern states, especially Tamil Nadu and Keralam, have fiercely opposed the NEP, Telangana has already adopted several of its recommendations.
The strongest critique of this gradual implementation came from students and faculty members of government polytechnic colleges across the state. They were opposing the inclusion of their institutions in the Young India Skills University (YISU) framework. The protestors demanded that the state government withdraw GO Ms No. 97, which formalised the merger.
YISU is a skilling university established under a public-private partnership, with Anand Mahindra chairing its Board of Governors, and it has no All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) recognition. Activists said YISU and the eventual GO Ms No. 97 implied direct adherence to the NEP 2020 by prioritising vocation over formal education.
Incidentally, Revanth told a media conference after his Telangana Rising international tour that the state’s focus on skill training and sports was part of the NEP implementation.
The NEP rollout has not been limited to polytechnics or YISU alone. The Telangana government has implemented NEP recommendations and announced plans to expand similar reforms across the state’s education system, from pre-primary to higher secondary institutions.
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The biggest criticism of NEP has been the commercialisation and privatisation of educational institutions. NEP recommends consolidating schools into a “school complex” model, which groups smaller schools into larger campuses.
According to a Ministry of Education reply to the Lok Sabha in February 2025, the number of government schools in India fell from about 11.07 lakh in 2014-15 to 10.17 lakh in 2023-24, while private schools grew from 2.88 lakh to 3.31 lakh during the same period. A NITI Aayog review put total closures over the decade at close to 94,000.
The policy prioritises public-private partnerships, described on paper as ‘public-private-philanthropic’ partnerships. In higher education, NEP pushes institutions to have independent boards with academic and administrative autonomy and to aim for financial robustness. Students alleged a noticeable increase in self-financed courses in elite institutions, making education unaffordable and harder to access.
The NEP also retains the three-language formula first introduced in the National Education Policy of 1968, while allowing states some flexibility in choosing the specific languages, provided at least two of the three are Indian. It also places special emphasis on Sanskrit as an option.
Centralisation is another fault line, and a major factor behind South Indian states’ opposition to the three-language policy. The Union Cabinet cleared the NEP in July 2020 without referring it to a parliamentary standing committee or passing it as a legislation. Education sits on the Concurrent List of the Constitution, meaning both the Centre and the states should have a say. While the NEP, on paper, is not binding on any state, the Union government has repeatedly tied compliance to money.
Participation in the Samagra Shiksha Abhiyan and the PM SHRI (PM Schools for Rising India) scheme, which funds infrastructure upgrades in existing government schools, is available to states that sign a Memorandum of Understanding, agreeing to implement NEP-aligned reforms.
Moreover, the policy’s aim of dismantling India’s coaching culture contrasts with recurring administrative failures in centralised examinations conducted by the National Testing Agency (NTA), such as the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) and the Common University Entrance Test (CUET).
The NEP introduces skill-based tracks from middle school. Activists argued that, when coupled with the 2016 amendment to the Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act, which permits children to work in family enterprises outside school hours, this development could make it easier for children from poorer households to drift out of formal academic education and into work, rather than higher study.
The opposition parties and student bodies have also warned that the NEP’s recommendations and centralised curriculum would lead to communalisation. In June 2026, former Keralam Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan termed the NEP a danger to the nation. He accused the Centre of using textbook revisions to alter historical narratives.
NEP’s other recommendations include replacing the 10+2 school structure with a 5+3+3+4 model, bringing early childhood education formally into schools for the first time, scrapping the M.Phil degree, and setting a national target for foundational literacy by Grade 3.
Teacher training is proposed to move to a four-year Integrated Teacher Education Programme, with a strict evaluation system for teachers in government institutions. Universities are pushed toward a multidisciplinary, multiple-exit structure with a certificate after one year, a diploma after two, and a degree after three or four years.
Also Read: Centre says education funds denied to Tamil Nadu, Kerala over NEP resistance
Tamil Nadu’s opposition dates back to the anti-Hindi agitations of 1937 and 1965.
The state adopted a two-language policy of Tamil and English in 1968 and has not deviated from it since. When the NEP revived the three-language formula in 2020, Tamil Nadu rejected it outright. In 2021, the DMK government formally wrote to the Union Ministry of Education, declining to accept the policy.
Since Tamil Nadu refused to sign the PM SHRI MoU, the State alleged that the Centre withheld funds owed under the Samagra Shiksha scheme. The then Chief Minister, MK Stalin, called it blackmail, and the Tamil Nadu government sued the Centre in the Supreme Court over non-disbursement of ₹2000 crore.
In August 2025, the state went a step further and released the State Education Policy for school education. Positioned as a counter to the NEP, it retained the two-language formula. After the Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK) came into power in 2026, Chief Minister C Joseph Vijay’s government assured that it would continue the two-language policy.
In Keralam, the CPI(M)-led Left Democratic Front government refused for years to sign the PM SHRI MoU and released its own supplementary textbooks restoring content that had been controversially deleted from NCERT texts. But the state eventually gave in to the funding pressure and signed the MoU to unlock roughly ₹1,150 crore in the withheld Samagra Shiksha funds.
In June 2026, the newly elected VD Satheesan’s United Democratic Front government first announced it would continue with PM SHRI. It argued that it had little choice since the previous government had already signed the agreement and received the funds. But the move has since been kept on hold, pending a decision by a four-member Cabinet subcommittee.
Also Read: Rural Tamil Nadu’s struggle with NEP 2020
Under the previous Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) government, Telangana neither accepted nor rejected the NEP.
A review of the state budget over the years showed a declining share for education, from 10.89% of the budget in 2014-15 to 6.24% by 2022-23. The K Chandrashekar Rao-led BRS government also faced litigation, with the High Court issuing notice for failing to implement the NEP.
It changed after the Congress government took office in December 2023. Chief Minister Revanth announced a Telangana Education Commission (TEC), formally constituted in September 2025, under former IAS officer Akunuri Murali.
At a public consultation in 2025, before the TEC was formalised, educationists and activists in Telangana called for a complete rejection of the NEP 2020, citing centralisation of education, saffronisation of the curriculum, and privatisation threats. They urged the state to draft its own education policy. The commission’s chairman, Murali, also criticised the NEP and expressed concerns about its impact on publicly funded education.
However, the committee’s report titled ‘Education Policy for Telangana 2026‘ drew significant backlash from student groups and educationists alike for adopting several NEP recommendations.
Similar to the NEP’s restructuring of schooling, the TEC proposed Telangana Foundation Schools, covering pre-primary to Class 2. For the succeeding years, the commission recommended converting 2,000 government schools into Telangana Public Schools, each meant to hold around 1,500 students.
The TEC also recommended merging the Telangana Board of Intermediate Education with the Board of Secondary Education, bringing Classes 11 and 12 under the school framework.
Revanth later said at a public event that 27,000 government schools in the state would be reorganised into 4,000 TPS schools, and an estimated 23,000 would be closed, mirroring the national policy’s reconsolidation of schools.
The NEP has proposed a State School Standards Authority and a national assessment body, PARAKH (Performance Assessment, Review, and Analysis of Knowledge for Holistic Development).
The TEC recommended an equivalent statutory authority, Telangana Educational Standards Authority (TESA), to audit and rank schools. The NEP’s National Professional Standards for Teachers tied promotion to performance appraisal rather than seniority. The TEC proposed a similar framework, in which 60 per cent of a teacher’s evaluation comes from independent, third-party student outcome data.
YISU was Telangana’s answer to the NEP’s vocational-education goals. It appeared prominently in the TEC report. The merger of polytechnics with YISU appeared as a recommendation in the report, where it explicitly mentioned transferring polytechnic colleges and ITIs from the State Board of Technical Education and Training (SBTET) to YISU.
Mallesh Raj Jatavath, an All India Democratic Students’ Organisation (AIDSO) student activist, told South First that the NEP’s real push is for privatisation, commercialisation, and narrowing education into vocational training at the expense of everything else. He criticised the skills-first approach for treating students as an assembly line for the corporate labour market.
Jatavath pointed to the scale of what is being handed over: thousands of crores worth of polytechnic and ITI land under a public-private partnership structure.
“If the Congress’s national leadership, and Rahul Gandhi in particular, has been leading student marches and speaking about the NEP that it’s destroying India’s education system and warning that the RSS wants to control it, why is a Congress state government adopting it? ” he asked.
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The rollout now touches nearly every stage of Telangana’s education system. As many as 832 schools were selected under PM SHRI. Unlike Tamil Nadu and Keralam, which spent years refusing to sign the scheme’s compliance MoU, Telangana’s participation has drawn comparatively little public attention.
The government has continued its efforts to reconsolidate schools despite backlash. The Young India Integrated Residential Schools, expected to replace the separate hostel systems for Backward Classes, Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and minority students, have picked up pace with significant state funding.
The pilot Telangana Public School was inaugurated at Artula in June, with more such schools expected soon. The Telangana Save Education Committee has vehemently opposed the restructuring plan and said it violates the Right to Education Act.
The TEC’s recommendation to bring Classes 11 and 12 under school education also received massive pushback. The state government said it put the decision on hold due to technical issues. But when recent reports suggested the merger may not be far off, the Intermediate Education Joint Action Committee and Government Junior Colleges Lecturers Association rejected the proposal.
At the Save Inter Education conference, Junior Lecturers warned of a statewide agitation if the government went ahead with the merger. They also opposed the related move to scrap the Class 11 board exam and the EAPCET (Engineering, Agriculture and Pharmacy Common Entrance Test).
In March, the Telangana Council of Higher Education convened a meeting of vice-chancellors from seven state universities, including Osmania, Kakatiya and Telangana University. The meeting unanimously resolved to implement the NEP’s credit framework for undergraduate and postgraduate programmes from the 2026-27 academic year.
The universities also backed the NEP-proposed multiple entry-exit system, which, according to the council, would help universities compete for national research grants and improve their National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) and National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) rankings.
Student Federation of India’s (SFI) Telangana secretary T Nagaraju told South First that state universities have already adopted several NEP reforms, such as scrapping the MPhil and relying heavily on outsourced faculty.
“They also slowly started introducing new courses in the name of industry readiness. These courses, such as a B Com in E-Commerce, are designed only to impart skills necessary for getting jobs at private companies while ignoring holistic, scientific education. The universities are also heavily underfunded and are making more and more courses self-financed,” Nagaraju said.
He added that the protests against polytechnic mergers exposed a deeper rot in the system, driven by the adoption of anti-student policies.
“Polytechnic students are from low-income backgrounds and will be significantly affected by GO Ms 97. But the NEP’s effect has been wide-ranging. Several engineering and degree colleges have already become unaffordable due to increased fees and major courses being turned into self-financed courses. Schools are also adopting the national curriculum, and now Anganwadis are at risk with the new Telangana Foundation Schools framework,” he added.
The SFI leader said that scrapping the GO, or excluding polytechnics from the merger, would not be enough. He added that protests would continue until NEP reforms are rolled back.
With the chief minister’s latest announcement of the state adopting a new education policy, attention has once again shifted to the TEC report. Student activists said they wanted a complete overhaul of any policies that borrow from the NEP 2020.
“We demand a Telangana Assembly resolution rejecting NEP 2020. A new state education policy should be framed without any influence of NEP. The government should make it a priority to save public education. We will continue our fight until it is achieved,” Nagaraju added.
(Edited by Majnu Babu).
