Governance at the Doorstep
The Andhra Pradesh Reorganisation Act gave Telangana ten districts. The new state looked at its own map and decided ten was not enough, not for a government that intended to reach every village. It redrew itself: 33 districts, 75 revenue divisions, 12,751 gram panchayats. And in 2018, a Presidential Order reserved 95 percent of government jobs for locals: the demand of 1952, of 1969, of every Mulki agitation in this library, finally written into law by a state of Telangana's own.
Section 3 of the Andhra Pradesh Reorganisation Act formed the state of Telangana from ten districts of the existing Andhra Pradesh: Adilabad, Nizamabad, Karimnagar, Medak, Warangal, Nalgonda, Ranga Reddy, Hyderabad, Khammam and Mahbubnagar. Those ten districts were an inheritance, drawn for the convenience of the state that had governed them. The government that took office in 2014 concluded that districts of that size kept the administration far from the people it served, and used the power that Section 11 of the same Act gave every successor state: the power to redraw its own internal map.
The numbers describe a single idea: administration at the doorstep. Alongside the new districts came 153 new mandals, 35 new revenue divisions, 8 new municipal corporations and 87 municipalities. The panchayat raj system was rebuilt from the ground up under the Telangana Panchayat Raj Act of 2018: 8,684 gram panchayats reorganised into 12,751, mandal praja parishads increased from 438 to 539, zilla parishads from 9 to 32. A citizen of the old Adilabad district who had once travelled a day to reach a collectorate now found the government a short bus ride away.
The Buildings of the New State
The reorganised administration was given a physical form. Integrated District Offices Complexes were taken up in 29 districts: every department's district headquarters in one building, so that the public could reach every government service in one place; observers noted that Telangana's district complexes were better appointed than some states' secretariats. At the centre of it all rose the new Dr. B.R. Ambedkar Telangana State Secretariat: a seven-storey building of seven lakh square feet, awarded the Indian Green Buildings Council's Gold rating, replacing the scattered and ageing blocks the old administration had worked from. Beside the state's new nerve centre came a state-of-the-art Police Command and Control Centre, built at a cost of Rs.585 crore. And the state's land records, the oldest instrument of rural oppression in Telangana's history, were moved onto the Dharani portal, from which anyone, anywhere in the world, can retrieve their record.
95 Percent: The Mulki Demand, Answered
One reform of these years reaches back through this entire library. In 1952, students died at City College demanding that Telangana's jobs go to Telangana's people. In 1969, about 369 people were killed in a movement that began with the same demand. The Mulki Rules were upheld, diluted, nullified and mourned across six decades. In 2018, the state of Telangana closed the question. Article 371-D of the Constitution was amended through the Telangana Public Employment (Organisation of Local Cadres and Regulation of Direct Recruitment) Order, 2018, and under G.O. 124 of 30 August 2018, 95 percent of posts in direct recruitment, from junior assistant to Group-I services, were reserved for local candidates, across the new structure of two multi-zones and seven zones covering all 33 districts. Under the combined state, local reservation had run at 60 to 80 percent, and its enforcement had been the movement's oldest grievance. The first government of Telangana wrote 95 percent into the law of the land.
The Reorganised State
- 33 districts, 75 revenue divisions, 153 new mandals, 12,751 gram panchayats, 539 mandal praja parishads, 32 zilla parishads.
- Integrated District Offices Complexes under construction in 29 districts, all district head offices of every department at one address.
- Dr. B.R. Ambedkar Telangana State Secretariat: seven storeys, 7 lakh square feet, IGBC Gold rated.
- Police Command and Control Centre built at Rs.585 crore.
- Dharani portal: land records retrievable from anywhere in the world.
- Presidential Order 2018: 95 percent of direct-recruitment government posts reserved for local candidates, up from 60 to 80 percent under the combined state.
- Under Section 5 of the Reorganisation Act, Hyderabad served as common capital for a period not exceeding ten years, Telangana's alone thereafter.
The redrawing of the map was governance, not symbolism, but it was also an answer to history. A region that had spent sixty years governed from far away, by administrations that reserved its jobs for others, now had a collectorate in reach of every home and a law that kept its employment for its own people. The chapter's remaining pages record what that government did with its new machinery.
