Telangana’s Congress government is busy implementing programmes without thought Premium

In Telangana, there is a wide gap between planning and implementation

The Congress rode to power in Telangana in December 2023 on the back of six guarantees and numerous other promises. Eleven months later, a few of the guarantees have been partially implemented, while some are still in the process of being implemented. However, there is a wide gap between planning and implementation and two examples illustrate this.

The first is the ongoing socioeconomic survey, which is part of the promise of conducting a caste survey. Many people have complained of a shortage of enumeration forms. Social activists claim that only Telugu and English forms are being used in the multilingual State. A similar exercise for collecting data about all the citizens in the State was conducted by the previous Telangana Rashtra Samithi government on August 19, 2014. At the time, the State was virtually shut down, and 4,00,00 government employees were deployed to collect details of citizens. However, the data disappeared into a black hole. A decade later, citizens are wary of sharing their economic and financial information once again.

Their concerns are not unfounded. In a sworn affidavit to the Telangana High Court in 2022, the government had stated that it had cancelled 18.6 lakh ration cards since 2014, citing “bogus” or “duplicate” cardholders as the reason. However, social activists argued that these deletions, which deprived many families of cheaper food grains, were based on flawed linkages in the Aadhaar database. In April 2022, the Supreme Court slammed the State and ordered it to conduct a verification programme for all the ration cardholders. This has not yet been carried out.

Now, the people are unwilling to share their data with data collectors in many parts of the State. They say that they had already shared data under a programme called the Praja Palana for new ration cards.

Editorial | Counting right: On caste surveys

Another significant project of the State government, aimed at revitalising the Musi River, has run into policy troubles. The 50-kilometre stretch of the Musi River in Hyderabad presents numerous challenges. Waste and industrial effluents are dumped into the river, sewage is discharged into the river, and there are numerous encroachments for the creation of parking bays and warehouses. In addition, there are slums in many areas.

Editorial | The Musi’s clean-up: On Hyderabad’s river plan