Hyderabad, July 16 -- Students at a government-run tribal welfare hostel in Mahabubabad walked out in protest on Thursday, July 16, saying they had been living for months with inadequate toilets and worsening hygiene, and that their repeated complaints to the school administration had gone nowhere.

The demonstration unfolded at the Kothaguda Tribal Welfare Hostel, where students said the numbers simply did not add up: two toilets for roughly 700 boarders.

'We have raised this before'

Some of the protesting students took their grievance directly to D Seethakka, the state's Panchayat Raj and Rural Development Minister and herself a tribal leader from Mulugu. What followed was less a formal delegation than a blunt appeal from teenagers wh...