The Chief Minister didn’t just show up to hand out awards. He showed up as a former government school student who still remembers what it felt like to sit in those classrooms.
Itanagar, September 10 — There was a moment at Wednesday’s Golden Jubilee Meritorious Students’ Awards ceremony that stood out from the usual applause and citations. Arunachal Pradesh Chief Minister Pema Khandu paused, stepped slightly out of the formal script, and spoke not as a politician — but as a man who once sat in a government school desk in Tawang. He was part of the first batch when Government Gompa Middle School was upgraded to the secondary level. He knows what these schools are, and he says he knows what they need to become.
That personal weight gave his announcement a different texture than the usual policy talk.
Khandu told the gathering that the state government is actively working to strengthen government schools — through better infrastructure, adequate teachers, and a full rollout of the National Education Policy 2020. A dedicated task force has already been constituted to drive NEP implementation across the state. Subject teacher recruitment through the Arunachal Pradesh Public Service Commission is underway. These aren’t promises scheduled for some vague future. According to the Chief Minister, they’re already moving.
What made the occasion particularly meaningful was the scale of achievement on display. Thirty state-level toppers from Classes III to XII for the 2024–25 academic session were felicitated at the ceremony. Across the state’s various districts, roughly 840 students received meritorious student awards. These are children from government schools — the very institutions that critics in many parts of India have written off as second-tier.
Khandu was not subtle about pushing back against that narrative. He pointed to rising enrolment in Arunachal’s government schools as a sign that confidence in these institutions is growing, at a time when other states are watching their government school rolls thin out. That, he said, is encouraging — and it is something the government intends to protect and build on.
He also spoke to the students directly. Stay disciplined. Stay focused. Don’t drift. And don’t ignore sports — every government school in the state, he noted, has a playground, because physical growth is as important as academic achievement. It was the kind of advice that sounds simple but lands differently when it comes from someone who walked the same path.
On the question of opportunity, Khandu went further. He spoke about creating jobs in both government and private sectors, about encouraging young people to think about entrepreneurship. And he made a specific pitch for the armed forces — urging Arunachal’s youth to consider becoming officers. The state’s first Sainik School, he said, is already operational at Pasighat. A second is coming up in Tawang. Beyond that, the state government is coordinating with the Army to build a structured coaching programme for students preparing for the NDA and CDS examinations. That’s a real pathway, not just a suggestion.
For a state with Arunachal’s geographical challenges — remote villages, difficult terrain, stretched infrastructure — the quality of a government school can genuinely define a child’s trajectory. That’s not abstract. It’s the difference between a future with options and one without.
Pema Khandu knows that. He said so, standing in front of 870 young achievers who proved the system can still produce brilliance. The real question now is whether the system will meet them halfway — and on Wednesday, at least, its leader made a convincing case that it intends to try.
