Three major IIT coaching academies in Madhapur, Hyderabad, have declared Diwali holidays and told students to leave their residential campuses by Wednesday morning, as a worsening water shortage grips the city. Sri Chaitanya, Narayana and Dhanik Bharat issued the circular on Tuesday, November 3, 2026, and the hostels they run can no longer keep their students supplied with water.

The crisis is linked to the El Niño effect, which has pushed water shortages across Telangana to a breaking point. Greater Hyderabad is the worst hit, and the shortage has spread into colleges and hostels, where demand for water is constant and cannot be postponed.

The Narayana group has moved the furthest. Ten of its campuses in Madhapur and the Ayyappa Society area have been given holidays, and management is considering shutting more campuses in the coming days. Dhanik Bharat and Sri Chaitanya have granted students home holidays, and many have already gone back to their families.

Hostels in the area were depending on private water tankers to meet their daily needs. Those supplies have dried up. Officials have recently started cracking down on tanker operators, and the flow of water to hostels has stopped in many places. Students need water for drinking, bathing, cooking, tiffin preparation and every other routine task, and the hostels have no reliable alternative.

One college needs four tankers a day to keep its hostels running, and for two days not a single tanker has arrived.

That gap is what forced the decision. Managements say they cannot run hostels without water, so they have chosen to send students home and move classes online. The circulars tell students to attend online classes every day during the break, which means the academic calendar continues even as the physical campuses shut down.

What happens after the holidays

The bigger question is when these campuses will reopen. Managements have not fixed a date. They say they will share information after the Diwali festival, leaving thousands of families with no clear timeline for when their children can return. For students who were preparing for competitive exams, the uncertainty adds a second layer of pressure on top of the disruption to daily life.

The problem is not limited to coaching institutes. Private hostels that relied on tankers are also struggling. As water supply falls, these hostels are finding it harder to meet the needs of students and private sector employees who live in them. Running costs are rising, and the strain on hostel operators is turning into a financial burden as well as an operational one.

Why this matters for Telangana

This is a Telangana story at its core. The shortage is hitting the state’s capital, and the areas most affected are the same neighbourhoods where thousands of students, working professionals and families depend on private supply to get through the day. When a coaching institute shuts its doors in the middle of a festival season, the disruption reaches parents, transport, and local businesses that rely on student traffic.

The episode also exposes how fragile the water arrangements are for institutions that have grown around private tankers. When enforcement tightens on those tankers, supply can collapse within days, and there is little room for a backup plan. The students being sent home are the immediate victims, but the wider risk falls on anyone living in a hostel or campus in the affected zones.

The bottom line

For now, the facts are clear. Major coaching academies in Madhapur have closed their residential campuses and sent students home. Hostels are running short on water because tanker deliveries have stopped. Managements have no reopening date, and students have been told to keep studying online. Whether more campuses follow the same path will depend on how quickly the water supply stabilises in the coming days.