Hyderabad: Students at a government-run tribal welfare hostel in Mahabubabad walked out in protest on Thursday, July 16, saying they had been living for months with inadequate toilets and worsening hygiene, and that their repeated complaints to the school administration had gone nowhere.
The demonstration unfolded at the Kothaguda Tribal Welfare Hostel, where students said the numbers simply did not add up: two toilets for roughly 700 boarders.
‘We have raised this before’
Some of the protesting students took their grievance directly to D Seethakka, the state’s Panchayat Raj and Rural Development Minister and herself a tribal leader from Mulugu. What followed was less a formal delegation than a blunt appeal from teenagers who said they had run out of patience.
“Madam, there are only two toilets for 700 students at the school,” the students told her. “We have raised the issue with the school management multiple times but there has been no response.”
It is a familiar complaint in Telangana’s network of tribal welfare institutions, where hostels built to house a few hundred students often end up accommodating far more, and where infrastructure upgrades tend to lag years behind enrolment.
For the students in Kothaguda, though, the arithmetic was less an abstract policy failure than a daily indignity, with long queues before school, unhygienic washrooms and a grievance that, by their own account, no one in the local administration had bothered to act on.
Minister steps in, promises action
Seethakka’s response was immediate, at least in tone. She assured the protesting students that the toilet shortage and the hygiene concerns around it would be addressed soon and did not mince words about who would be held responsible if conditions failed to improve. Officials found to have neglected the hostel, she warned, would face strict action.
That assurance was enough, for now, to bring the protest to a close. Students called off their agitation after the minister’s intervention, returning to their hostel with a promise in hand rather than a fixed timeline.
What happens next
Whether that promise translates into new toilet blocks and better hygiene infrastructure, or simply defuses today’s protest until the next one, will depend on follow-through from the tribal welfare department in the coming weeks. For a hostel meant to give first-generation tribal students a shot at an education away from home, the basic dignity of adequate sanitation is not a small ask.
It is, as Thursday’s protest made clear, one that students felt they had already waited too long for.
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