Krishna district set out to enroll 89,410 students for the new academic year through Badi Pilustondi, a door-to-door campaign in which teachers and local officials visit homes to track down children who might otherwise skip the start of term. Ten days after schools reopened, the district has reached 80,438 of that target, including roughly 4,000 children who moved from private schools into government ones.
Not every transfer has gone through cleanly. About 1,500 students are still stuck in administrative limbo because some of the private schools they're leaving haven't submitted the paperwork, officials call it the drop box process, that formally releases a student's records so a government school can enroll them. Until that paperwork moves, the children remain on neither school's active rolls.
District Education Officer Y.V. Subba Rao said his office is following up directly with the private schools that haven't completed the transfers and expects the backlog to clear soon. The delay isn't about the students or their new schools; it's a function of records management between institutions that don't share a database, and it's resolved case by case as schools submit the missing files.
The shift of thousands of students from private to government classrooms is itself worth noting. Andhra Pradesh's enrollment drives have typically focused on stopping dropouts, but Krishna's numbers this year point to families actively choosing government schools over private ones, a trend that, if it holds beyond one district, would mark a reversal of the steady private-school pull seen across the state over the past decade.
