Telangana polls: TRS is fighting for another term to fulfil unkept promises

The Congress is homing in on the regressive aspects of the Rao regime - nepotism and corruption - and his belief in superstition and astrology

When Chief Minister of Telangana K Chandrasekhara Rao told (not asked) his cabinet that he was advancing the Assembly elections, the first to be held in the new state, he believed the timing was just right —wrapped up elsewhere, the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Congress alike would be distracted by other Assembly elections and he could steer the poll along political lines, harking back to the statehood movement. 

He had, after all, led the movement for 14 years, launching his own party, the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS), in 2001. At the centre of the struggle, apart from statehood, were three goals: Water, jobs and resource, which the people desperately wanted.

But as Rao has a somewhat chequered record on providing all three.

Telangana today looks very different from the backward region attached to undivided Andhra Pradesh till only a few years ago. For one thing, seasonal distress migration has disappeared completely in places like Mahbubnagar district. 

People from this district, who are known as Palamur labour to the outside world, for decades used to migrate in thousands to Mumbai and other big cities every year, seeking work at construction sites. In village after village, you would find only old, aged people, not able to work any more. Every able-bodied hand would leave in search of work. In fact, such was the economy of the region that transporters did brisk business. In the early 1990s, one state transport bus used to run through Mahbubnagar every day. Today, there are more than 100. All these used to carry loads of semi-skilled and unskilled labour travelling out to earn a living and keep body and soul together.

No longer. Ashok Tankasala, a senior journalist who has toured the project areas, says the district is now green because the state government has expanded irrigation facilities under small and medium irrigation projects. The government has announced that it will facilitate the return of the thousands of families that had migrated to the textile cities of Surat and Sholapur and other places decades ago. Textile parks in places like Warangal will be started, the government promised, so that migrants would be spared travelling out for jobs.

Although the textile parks initiative is yet to take off, migration has stopped. Instead, labourers from Odisha and Hindi-speaking states can now be spotted all over Telangana, not just Hyderabad city, engaged in low-paid, manual hard labour jobs, including hotels and construction sites. What is luring them to the state are social welfare schemes — Rs 1 a kg rice, social security pensions, etc — to which the TRS government has added another layer: Delivery benefits to new mothers, marriage assistance of Rs 100,000 to the daughters in their families and sheep to people engaged in sheep-rearing activity among other things.

Statehood gave its people a general sense of entitlement, which was further reinforced by previous election promises of the TRS government involving individual benefits like free double bedroom houses for weaker sections, allotment of three-acre land to each landless scheduled caste family in the state.

The agenda was more or less set. The election promises have been growing bigger by the day as the competing political forces are raising the bar on each one of the existing schemes through their election manifestos.

For instance, the KCR government had waived up to Rs 100,000 farm loan per family, totalling about Rs 170 billion. The Congress has declared recently that it would waive Rs 200,000 loan per farmer if it was voted to power. The TRS is now talking about a waiver of loans in the range of Rs 300,000-Rs 500,000 per family.

In addition to the competing new promises, the issue of what the government did or did not do for the people in terms of delivering its earlier promises also gets the central focus in the ongoing political battle as both the ruling TRS and the Congress-led opposition alliance are trying to build their cases to stake claim for power using this as basis as well.

Rao launched schemes that he had never promised in the past. The Rs 8,000 per acre cash payment per year to farmers under the Rytu Bandhu programme (the Congress promised to increase the amount under this scheme as well) launched this year is one of them.

The Congress is homing in on the regressive aspects of the Rao regime — nepotism and corruption (Rao’s family and extended family dominate the government) — and his belief in superstition and astrology (Rao has attended no election rally and will likely start only now because the period was considered astrologically inauspicious). 

But Rao has said on other occasions that he badly needs another tenure — mainly to keep promises made but not fulfilled. For instance, as early as in 2015, Rao declared that he would not seek votes for the party next time if he did not complete the gigantic Mission Bhageeratha project, aimed at providing piped water to each household in every village of the state by 2018.

This project alone costs more than Rs 400 billion to the state exchequer according to the earlier estimates.

Similarly, Rao had thought of operationalising at least one or two giant pumps on the Rs 800-billion multi-level Kaleshwaram Lift Irrigation project before December 2018. He wanted to show people that his government was well on course to execute this gigantic project that was designed to provide irrigation to an extent of 10 million acres of land.

That seems unlikely now.

The TRS is now fighting for another term to fulfil unkept promises: Something that the opposition Congress keeps reminding voters in the state.