TOI reporters visited govt schools across six Rajasthan districts after the row over CJP volunteers inspecting campuses. What they found, from Kota’s coaching hub to desert villages and tragedy-hit Piplodi, was a system in which children study under tin sheds, squeeze into unsafe rooms, and sometimes find their school locked. In Kota, a primary school with 78 students operates from municipal parking kiosks and tin sheds. Three teachers run the school on deputation, with no permanent teaching posts sanctioned. A PWD survey found 61 school buildings in the district ruined and hundreds of classrooms unsafe. Across Barmer, Jaisalmer and Balotra, some schools lack buildings, while transfers have left senior-secondary streams without teachers. In Piplodi, Jhalawar, where a roof collapse killed seven children in July 2025, classes still run from a farmer’s two-room home as construction of a new school drags on. In the CM’s Sanganer constituency, 404 students at one school have been pushed into four rooms after a second building was declared unsafe. Assembly data shows 611 govt schools have no building of their own; 2,047 lack toilets; and 1,049 lack drinking water. Another 3,768 buildings and 83,783 classrooms are classified as completely dilapidated. Rajasthan also has 7,200 single-teacher schools and 1.5 lakh vacant teacher posts.
It has 78 enrolled students from classes I-V who study in six classrooms but there can be no building inspection at Govt Primary School on MBS Road in Kota. The school, established in 2023, doesn’t have one. Children who come to study here gather under small tin sheds created next to municipal parking ticket kiosks. Pathways to success that all of India chases are all around them. But it’ll take a miracle for anyone in this batch to one day make that short walk to one of the city’s many fabled coaching centres, where many of India’s brightest prospects in medical and engineering come to hone their skills in a widely publicised ‘topper-producing’ machinery. Kota’s higher education success, riding entirely on private enterprise, hasn’t pulled up with it the city’s own govt education system. It’s a constituency that Rajasthan’s education minister Madan Dilawar represents, but that too has made little difference to many children who have been going to ‘school’ on footpaths, cramming into single rented rooms or under tin sheds in a state that sees extreme temperatures. Last week, a Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) delegation led by Ashutosh Ranka was chased away by a mob after it went on an inspection of a govt school in Jaipur. In Kota, though, there’s little that’s hidden behind walls about the state of primary schools. Within a day after this non-inspection, however, Rajasthan’s BJP govt led by CM Bhajan Lal Sharma pledged to spend Rs 12,000 crore on schools over three years. Shobana Gupta, the in-charge of the primary school on MBS Road in Ward 33, says, “We operate out of six municipal kiosks and from under a tin shade. We have adequate arrangements for drinking water, electricity, and basic toilet facilities available onsite. There are no sanctioned permanent teaching posts here yet. Three teachers are currently deployed on deputation to manage the classes.” At Govt Senior Secondary School in Vigyan Nagar — a designated centre for JEE and NEET — the school sits inside a Rajasthan Housing Board building that is falling apart. Nine classrooms need major repair. Two are unusable but funds haven’t been allocated yet for demolition or repairs. Mold has eaten into walls of functional classrooms and the school’s ‘smart classroom’. A part of the perimeter wall has given way. Thieves have stolen the school’s water taps and CCTV cameras worth Rs 70,000. Principal Anita Sharma is still waiting for funds. At Shiv Nagar, Govt Primary Sanskrit School has been running for eight years now out of a single rented room, reached by a muddy track that’s impassable in the rains. Enrolment has fallen to 8-10 students under one teacher in a locality of around 60,000 people. “This locality has children who want to study Sanskrit. I have repeatedly submitted memorandums, but no permanent building has been sanctioned yet,” said former ward councillor Dhanraj Gurjar Chechi. Dilawar, incidentally, publicly champions Sanskrit learning as part of Indian cultural values.
At Govt Upper Primary School in Devripunia, Dharmpura — in Ladpura constituency of BJP MLA Kalpna Devi, roughly 10 km from Dilawar’s residence — 130-plus enrolled students share three classrooms built decades ago under Rajiv Gandhi Swarn Jyanti Pathshala scheme. The school was upgraded to upper-primary status in 2021, but the promised classroom expansion never came. On full-attendance days, children sit under trees, on the veranda, or on open ground. Drinking water comes via a temporary line from an adjoining field. Principal Chandra Prakash Meena has written to both the MLA and the minister. Days before this report, 27 students fell ill after eating their mid-day meal. A Public Works Department survey of Kota district’s 1,088 govt schools found 61 buildings entirely ruined and marked for demolition, plus two classrooms flagged as unsafe in each of 318 school buildings, and one classroom each in a further 98. Only 41 full buildings and 29 partial structures have been demolished so far. District collector Peeyush Samaria’s office has no record of any personal inspection visit to a govt school. Samaria remained unavailable for comment.
At Bojyawas Govt Primary School, there are toilets, but they have no water. The water tank has cracked and dense cobwebs, indicating it hasn’t been in use for some time. The school shares space with a sub-health centre, where fungus covers medicine boxes and water stains mark chairs and registers. A staff member said open defecation has become routine for her. She does her best by consciously holding off the urge to use a toilet. The school itself has 10 students in classes 1 to 5 under a single teacher. Govt Secondary School, Kalyanpura, looks well-kept from the gate, till you learn that one of its two buildings has been shut as unsafe, leaving 404 students across classes 1–12 to squeeze into four rooms. The school runs two shifts, 7am–12 noon and 12:30–6pm, and some second-shift students sit under a tin shed outside because the classes can’t accommodate them. Washrooms don’t have regular water supply and are cleaned only twice a month, said a Class 12 student. With no security guard and a broken, low boundary wall, the campus has seen repeated thefts. As a result, each classroom door has three latches and three separate locks. At Govt Upper Primary Sanskrit School in Hasampur Basdi, 85 students from classes 1 to VIII are taught in four classrooms — one of which is assigned to a booth level officer for special intensive revision (SIR) work. Teacher Rajendra Verma produced letters he has submitted seeking a playground, boundary fencing and a tubewell. The school has been running on tanker water for close to a year, he said. At Govt Primary School in Hasampura, there was no need to interview anyone about the school’s condition. The gate was locked at 9.30am on a weekday. Former ward councillor Ram Singh Choudhary said he has been writing to govt for three years about the school’s lack of facilities.
In Rajasthan’s desert border districts, several schools have no building. In Ramsar panchayat, Barmer, Govt Upper Primary School Azad Nagar was sanctioned in the 2022–23 budget and began classes in March 2023. But its 37 students study in a hut built by villagers or under trees. “Whether it rains, there is a storm or it is extremely hot, we have to study under trees,” said a Class V student. Land for the school was allotted only in 2024, and construction funds await sanction. At the Govt Higher Secondary School in Majal village, Samdari block (Balotra district), students and parents locked the school gate after nine teachers were transferred out at once, leaving senior secondary arts, science and agriculture streams without lecturers. “When there are no lecturers in the school, how will we study? How can Grade-II teachers perform the duties of lecturers?” a student asked. The protest ended after education officials agreed to post three teachers on deputation. Assembly data, drawn from UDISE 2025-26 figures, shows both districts have building-less schools: 36 in Barmer and 25 in Jaisalmer. Jaisalmer also features among districts hit hardest by a separate supply failure — a shortfall in the milk powder needed for the state’s Pannadhay Bal Gopal Yojana.
On the morning of July 25, 2025, the roof of Govt Upper Primary School in Piplodi, a tribal village in Jhalawar, collapsed during class hours. Seven children died; 21 were injured. A year on, Piplodi has visibly changed — better roads, more power connections, regular health camps, rising enrolment — but the one thing it still lacks is a functioning school building. Classes at the school have run since last August out of the two-room house of Mor Singh, a 60-year-old farmer and shepherd who vacated his own home so children would not lose another year of school. A new school building — eight classrooms, an anganwadi centre and a kitchen — is under construction, originally due by July 24, 2026. It has since been delayed after villagers raised concerns about construction quality when work began last November. Officials demolished the substandard work and restarted. “Construction of the school is taking longer than expected as villagers raised concerns about the quality of construction,” said Jhalawar collector Ajay Singh, adding that surprise inspections are now held every few weeks and the building should be ready by October. Among Rajasthan’s blocks, Jhalawar has the highest concentration of building-less govt schools. District-wide, 81 schools lack toilets. Assembly data show 611 govt schools statewide with no building of their own, including 10 girls’ schools, 2,047 schools with buildings that lack toilets, and 1,049 that lack drinking water.
Rajasthan’s 2026–27 budget allocates Rs 64,205 crore to school and college education. Of this allocation, around 75% goes into staff salaries and only 10–15% goes infrastructure. The state employs the second-highest number of teachers in the country, at 7.93 lakh, second only to UP. Yet, it has 7,200 single-teacher govt schools serving over 1.5 lakh students. Around 1.5 lakh sanctioned teacher posts remain vacant. The state’s own infrastructure data lays out the scale of the problem: 3,768 school buildings, 83,783 classrooms and 16,765 toilets are classified as entirely dilapidated while another 2,19,902 classrooms and 29,753 toilets need repair. Over the past two years, govt says it has spent Rs 2,723 crore building 179 new school buildings and 7,945 new classrooms to replace dilapidated ones. With govt funds in scarce supply, state-run schools increasingly lean on voluntary and community money. Statewide, philanthropic donations for school development totalled Rs 138 crore in 2024 and Rs 140 crore in 2025. In Pali district, a donor-led ‘Aao Gaon Chalen’ campaign — connecting migrants and philanthropists to their native villages — has targeted raising Rs 300 crore for infrastructure work. “There are around 23,000 such teachers in the state who are posted in a school where they are not needed, and their posting should be in another school, but they have not accepted their new posting. For instance, in an English-medium school, a Hindi-medium teacher who was earlier posted does not accept their new posting after a transfer, and the Hindi medium school, where the teacher is needed, students are suffering in that school,” said Mahendra Pandey, chief general secretary of Rajasthan Primary and Secondary Teachers Association.
The consequences have spilled onto the streets. In Sikar, Class 12 students protested dilapidated buildings that force school closures every time it rains, alongside a shortage of subject teachers. In Gangapur City (Sawai Madhopur), girls locked the gates of the Mahatma Gandhi English Medium School in Meena Badoda, Wazirpur, after the principal was pulled onto local-body election duty, compounding an existing teacher shortage. At Govt Senior Secondary School in Majal village in Balotra district, students locked the gates after nine teachers were transferred simultaneously. A Class XII student at Govt Higher Secondary School at Majal in Balotra said: “If we had to study without teachers, then we could have studied at home. What is the need to come to school? If a school is operational, teachers must be posted.”
The infrastructure debate has become an open political fight. A civic campaign, ‘School Thik Karo’, backed by CJP, has sent volunteer teams to inspect schools across nine districts — Jaipur, Ajmer, Jodhpur, Udaipur, Dholpur, Bharatpur, Kota, Barmer and Hanumangarh — after receiving what it says are public requests. “It has been over a year since the school collapse tragedy in Jhalawar, and the education minister has still not shared a concrete plan on how over 80,000 classrooms in dilapidated conditions will be fixed. Students are being forced to study in unsafe buildings, risking their lives,” said CJP national spokesperson Ashutosh Ranka. One inspection, in Jaipur’s Bagru constituency, found a school that had been operating out of a buffalo shed for two and a half years after its own building was declared unsafe; it was shifted to a house only after drawing media attention.
The state education department has now issued an order requiring prior permission for any outsider to enter school premises, and barring photography, videography, interviews or livestreaming involving students without the principal’s consent.
Opposition leader Tikaram Jully called it an attempt to hide failures: “Instead of fixing schools, if you introduce ‘no entry’ measures just to hide your own failures, how can such accidents be prevented? A useless ‘double-engine’ govt,” Jully said.
