On a budget and a prayer: The struggle for survival of low-cost pvt schools

Closed by Covid-19, budget private schools are struggling to cope and many could collapse without timely intervention

K Tulasi Vishnu Prasad is worried.  He — like his father and before him, his father — has invested his life in the Sri Rama Rural School of which he is the president. The school was set up in Chilumuru, a rural hamlet in Andhra Pradesh’s Guntur district, by his grandfather in 1949, years before the state came into being.

Even in the early days, families living hundreds of miles away would send their children here. Students would also travel by boat upstream from Kollur, 4 km away, to attend classes. Today, a pandemic is keeping them — some 900