While floodwaters recede across Ganjam district in southern Odisha, the state government is racing to get children back into classrooms — and Odisha Chief Minister Mohan Charan Majhi made clear on Tuesday, 3 November 2026, that restoring education is the top priority of the post-flood recovery push.

Posting in Odia on X, CM Majhi stated: 'In the post-flood situation, recovery work in Ganjam district is being given the highest priority. Cleaning and sanitation work at flood-affected schools has been accelerated so that teaching can return to normal as quickly as possible.'

Why Ganjam schools are always in the firing line

Ganjam is one of Odisha's most flood-prone coastal districts, sitting in the path of the Rushikulya river system and exposed to Bay of Bengal weather systems. Seasonal inundation regularly forces school closures, turning classrooms into relief shelters and leaving buildings caked in silt, debris, and contaminated water once floods drain away. The learning disruption compounds quickly — every day a school stays closed adds to cumulative losses that children in underserved communities rarely recover fully.

The Majhi government's decision to treat school sanitation as a frontline recovery task, rather than an afterthought, follows a playbook that Odisha administrations have leaned on for years. After Cyclone Fani in 2019, large-scale cleaning drives across Ganjam and neighbouring districts were credited with shrinking the gap between disaster and school reopening. That institutional memory is clearly being activated again.

Sanitation before the bell rings again

The emphasis on cleaning and sanitation is deliberate and medically important. Flood-inundated schools carry residual contamination risks — waterborne pathogens, structural damp, and compromised drinking-water points — that can trigger health crises if children return too early. Accelerating the sanitation drive is therefore both an education decision and a public-health one.

Local education officials and district administration teams are understood to be coordinating the effort on the ground, with Ganjam being the focal district named by the Chief Minister. Whether the drive will be extended to other flood-hit districts in Odisha remains the key question to watch in the coming days.

For the students of Ganjam, the clock is ticking. Every cleaned classroom brought back into service is a direct signal that the state's recovery machinery is working — and that their education did not wash away with the floodwaters.