Walk into a government school in Andhra Pradesh before 2019. In many of them, you would find walls with peeling paint, toilets that had never been cleaned, classrooms with broken windows, and benches so old the wood had rotted. Good families sent their children to private schools. Poor families had no choice.
YS Jagan Mohan Reddy looked at those buildings and made a decision: no child should be ashamed of going to a government school.
Nadu Nedu meaning “Our School, Our Pride” was launched in 2020 as a comprehensive school infrastructure transformation programme. The scale was unlike anything attempted before in Andhra Pradesh’s education history.
Nine core components were targeted: safe drinking water, electricity and fans, toilets for boys and girls separately, proper compound walls, basic furniture, kitchen sheds for mid-day meals, libraries, playground equipment, and English teaching tools. Every government school in the state over 15,000 of them
was brought into the programme in phases.
The budget was significant. The execution was monitored directly from the Chief Minister’s office. Progress dashboards, before-and-after photographs, and geo-tagged completion records were made public. This was not a scheme to be announced and forgotten.
What changed in communities was as much psychological as physical. When a government school in a village looks clean, well-maintained, and modern, parents who had been paying money they couldn’t afford to send their children to private schools began reconsidering. Enrollment in government schools increased in districts where Nadu Nedu had been completed.
For SC, ST, and BC communities whose children overwhelmingly depend on government education, Nadu Nedu was a statement: the state sees you, and your children’s dignity matters.
The private school industry in Andhra Pradesh had, for decades, thrived on the failures of government education. Nadu Nedu challenged that assumption not by attacking private schools, but by making public schools genuinely competitive.
That is what real educational reform looks like.
