Thimmanna Gari Subhash Reddy has watched the Telugu movie Srimanthudu multiple times. This Mahesh Babu-starrer saw the superstar essaying the role of an idealist who goes back to a remote village and helps develop it. Drawing some inspiration from the same film and adding his own determination to it, Subhash Reddy spent nearly Rs 6 crore reconstructing the Zilla Parishad High School in Bibipet Mandal of Kamareddy district in Telangana which was inaugurated by MAUD Minister KT Rama Rao, Education Minister Sabitha Indra Reddy and R&B Minister Vemula Prashanth Reddy on November 9, 2021. And in what can be deemed as poetic justice, Minister Rama Rao said that he would invite Mahesh Babu for another event at the school. Also, guess what? Mahesh Babu actually tweeted about the same and called Subhash Reddy "a true HERO". Now, imagine how delighted Subhash Reddy is.
Rama Rao gave a rousing speech at the inauguration, imploring those who are financially well off to come forward and contribute to the development of society, just like Subhash Reddy had done, calling the new school a "benchmark" for other state schools to follow. Feeling inspired, the minister said that he too would like to construct a new building for the primary school in Konapur village, which is also his grandmother's native village.
Constructed before independence in the 1920s, this school was Urdu-medium first, informs Reddy, taking us back further into the history of the school. It was made Telugu-medium in 1956. As a school student studying at ZPHS Bibipet, Subhash Reddy was a typical 'badi donga' (students who bunk class to frolic around), but never, not for a moment, did he forget the excellent teachers and the slightly strict principal and headmaster of the school. All in all, wonderful memories of those days still manage to make the businessman and Margam Foundation chief smile. But when he and his friends from the good ol' days gathered for a reunion in 2017, they couldn't help but talk about the state of ruin it was in. "Whenever there were rains, schools would close. The doors and windows were in a dilapidated state and only six to seven rooms out of the 16 classrooms were truly functional," says Reddy recalling the sorry state of affairs.
This image Reddy just painted bears no resemblance to the new school that occupies 42,000 sqft space today with 32 new classrooms, a compound wall, a centralised sound system, RO plant, a 3,200 sft dining area with a separate gate, three one-bedroom spaces for teachers, a computer lab with 27 PCs and a new dedicated teacher... it's quite the list of improvements. "The foundation stone was laid by Education Minister Sabitha Indra Reddy and MLA Gampa Govardhan in October 2020 and the school was constructed within nine months," he informs.
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Now that the construction and inauguration are out of the way, Reddy and a few alumni have created a corpus fund of one crore and 20 lakh, and growing, for maintenance of the school which includes cleaning, sanitisation, online education and extra teachers. Rs 11 lakh donation was announced by MP BB Patil for the same fund. "We want to put up photo frames of inspiring personalities and now that they want to include intermediate in the next phase, we are thinking even further. We would like to construct a university," says Reddy with a quiet passion.
Apart from crediting his wife Rajini for supporting and enabling him, Reddy says that it is only because of the unity, motivation and strength of the former students of the school that this feat has been made possible. "Infrastructure-wise, the school is now number one. We want to make it number one in terms of education as well," he says.
