Miles to go: on one year of the Congress government in Telangana Politics & News

A year is too short a time to assess a government’s performance, but it is still long enough to ascertain its commitment to fulfil its promises. The first Congress government in Telangana led by Chief Minister A. Revanth Reddy rode on the back of six guarantees, with a focus on widespread corruption allegations against Mr. Reddy’s predecessor, K. Chandrashekar Rao, who was perceived as being inaccessible and lording over a family-run fiefdom. The guarantees were directed at women, farmers, youth, and the elderly, aiming to enhance disposable incomes, social securities, and to provide employment. They range from providing ₹2,500 a month for women who are heads of below-poverty-line families, to doubling retirement pension for the disabled, and the poor among the elderly. A year on, some of these measures implemented include free public transport for women and increased medical insurance cover per family of up to ₹10 lakh, as well as fiscally expensive decisions such as 200 units of free power per household and writing off farmers’ loans up to ₹2 lakh.

Some of the unfulfilled measures include raising input support for farmers from ₹10,000 annually — provided by the predecessor Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) government — to ₹15,000, and filling two lakh government job vacancies. The government has cited a fiscal crisis caused by the Chandrashekar Rao government as the reason for this. Days after Mr. Reddy was sworn in on December 7, 2023, his government released a “white paper on the State’s finances”, which detailed a “more than ten times” jump in Telangana’s debt from ₹72,658 crore to over ₹6.71 lakh crore under the 10 year-long reign of the BRS, and that debt servicing alone constituted more than a third of the State’s budget, leaving “very little fiscal space” to implement the Congress guaranteed welfare measures. Since Mr. Reddy rode to power on the popular sentiment of familial corruption, judicial commissions have been set up to probe financial malfeasance in projects ranging from the Kaleshwaram Lift Irrigation Scheme to the power purchase agreement with Chhattisgarh. Mr. Reddy has also accused the Bharatiya Janata Party-led Union government of giving the State short-shrift in tax devolutions and the implementation of centrally funded projects. One promise that Mr. Reddy has worked on is the conduct of a caste census. While it has run into controversy, with complaints of a duplication of information provided to the earlier government, the outcome of the survey and the changes to reservations in government jobs and employment are being keenly watched. Mr. Reddy’s hurdles are daunting, but what appears to be lacking is a transparent plan and a candid admission on what to expect, given the situation, over the next four years.