Telangana’s Congress government is busy implementing programmes without thought

Enumerators collect data during the socioeconomic survey in Hyderabad on November 9, 2024.
| Photo Credit: The Hindu

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 surveywhich 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

Instead of addressing the systemic issues of pollution and large-scale encroachments, the government has focused on one slum located along the river. About 165 families were relocated from one area of the river to two-bedroom homes about two kilometres from the site. However, the relocation did little to gain the trust of the people or assuage their concerns.

On October 2, 2024, the district collector announced a ₹25,000 displacement allowance. But two days prior to this, the residents had already been relocated to their new dwellings. It was evident that there was no strategy in place.

A large-scale project such as this needed a proper rehabilitation policy in place, apart from a detailed project report, a solid plan for financing, and confidence-building measures. Instead, the government put up its plans on social media, showing the riverfront being transformed into a glass, chrome, and grassy wonderland with a string of bridges running across the river. Recently, the buffer zone of the river was increased from 30 metres to 50 metres on the advice of the Irrigation Department, which made more people wary of the project.

The cost of the project is another point of contention. A ballpark figure of ₹1,50,000 crore was floated. Chief Minister A. Revanth Reddy announced that it would be built entirely in the private-public partnership (PPP) model and the State would not incur any expense on it. But civil rights activists say the PPP model is exclusionary in nature. The area around the river is densely populated and some of the neighborhoods are poor. The area lacks parks and leisure spaces. They argue that a riverfront project built under a PPP model would be a ticketed affair, gentrifying the space and excluding the very people who live there.

It is time the Congress government gets its act together. Telangana needs socioeconomic survey data for examining its reservation policy. It also needs the Musi Riverfront Development Plan to rejuvenate the river. But the government must ensure that it has plans and policies in place before executing these and other promises.