A dream to give every government-school child what private schools take for granted — that, says Union Agriculture Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, is what sparked the CM Rise School scheme during his tenure as Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh. In a post on X on Sunday, 27 September 2026, Chouhan offered a rare, candid look at the emotional impulse behind one of his flagship education initiatives.

Chouhan wrote, 'Dil mein ek tadap thi' — 'There was a longing in my heart' — to build government schools that would surpass private ones in quality, equipping them with laboratories, libraries, smart classrooms, and playgrounds. 'It was from this thinking,' he said, 'that the idea of the CM Rise School was conceived.' He referred to the students as his bhanje-bhaanjiyaan — nephews and nieces — the familial term he often uses for the children of Madhya Pradesh.

What CM Rise Schools were built to deliver

The CM Rise School scheme was conceived as a structural intervention, not a cosmetic upgrade. Select government schools across Madhya Pradesh were to be developed with infrastructure that typically draws families toward fee-charging private institutions: fully equipped science and computer labs, stocked libraries, interactive smart classrooms, and usable playgrounds. The ambition was direct — stop the exodus of aspirational rural and semi-urban families from the public education system.

The scheme built on earlier model-school efforts in the state, including Adarsh Schools, which Chouhan's governments had promoted over successive terms. But CM Rise was positioned as a step-change: fewer, better-resourced schools rather than incremental improvements spread thin across thousands of campuses.

Why the 'private school benchmark' framing matters

Across India, state governments have grappled with the same structural problem: public schools are chronically under-resourced, and middle-class as well as aspirational lower-income families vote with their feet — and their fees — toward private alternatives. The result is a reinforcing cycle where government schools lose enrolled students, lose funding rationale, and lose political attention.

By explicitly benchmarking CM Rise against private schools, Chouhan's framing was politically pointed. It signalled that quality — not just access or enrolment numbers — was the stated metric. That framing also aligns with the central government's Samagra Shiksha framework, which has pushed states to improve learning outcomes and physical infrastructure simultaneously.

Chouhan is now the Union Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, but his post signals that the education legacy he built in Bhopal remains close to his political identity — and may yet inform how he thinks about rural public services at the national level.

The children of Madhya Pradesh's government schools, he insists, deserve nothing less than the best. That bet, placed during his state tenure, is still being graded.