Vasalamarri (Telangana): It’s 5 pm in the evening, and in a corner of Vasalamarri in Telangana’s Yadadri Bhuvanagiri district, Nara Lakshmi sits near the entrance of her crumbling house rolling beedis, a livelihood for lakhs of women in this part of the state.
The wall just inside her decrepit house, with its corroded tin roofs, unwieldy wooden pillars, and cracked and peeling walls, bears a red ‘X’ mark — a sign that it has been marked out for demolition.
Vasalamarri is a village with a population of 2,600 people that Telangana Chief Minister K Chandrashekar Rao adopted in November 2020. While adopting the village, KCR had asked officials to raze such old houses to the ground and construct new ones in their place.
According to Pogula Anjaneyulu, the sarpanch of the village who has been with the ruling Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) since its inception as the Telangana Rashtra Samithi in 2001, 480 out of 550 houses were identified for demolition, including the one in which 65-year-old Nara Lakshmi lives with her 70-year-old husband, Satyanarayana.
Among the marked houses are some that allegedly hinder the expansion of streets or lanes.
But since then, several people — the elderly couple among them — are still waiting for the promise to be fulfilled. For now, the couple, who belong to the backward Padmashali caste, have managed to have a room repaired by putting together some funds.
“It was a generous decision (the promise of better housing), but where are the new houses? All bogus talk,” says their neighbour, Narasimhulu Poola.
The unfulfilled promise of pucca houses isn’t the only grouse the village has with the chief minister and his party, the BRS. Telangana votes for its 119-member house on 30 November, and, as dusk falls in this village days before it casts its ballot, a group of villagers gathered for a chat list out other issues — lack of basic infrastructure such as proper roads, unfulfilled promises of government jobs, ration cards for the public distribution system, and pension schemes.
A few blocks away from Nara Lakshmi’s house, Bhaskar Dubbaka, a marketing executive, complains about the unfinished road in front of their house that’s “particularly dangerous for their toddlers”.
Sirisha Palugula, who’s in her mid-20s, complains about not having been given a ration card despite the many appeals made to authorities. “I got married a few years ago and now have small children. How can new families like us survive,” she asks.
The villagers see their problems as a microcosm of “various issues plaguing people across Telangana”, says one resident.
Political observers agree. “While there’s resentment everywhere, it’s a pity that such problems have remained unresolved in a village that the CM adopted,” says Akunuri Murali, a retired IAS officer and convenor of Jago Telangana, a network of civil society groups. “In KCR’s own constituency Gajwel too, people are furious that their legislator is never available to them.”
According to Kishore Poreddy, spokesperson of Telangana Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Vasalamarri stands as testimony to the chief minister’s “deceptive politics”. “If KCR cannot keep the basic promises he made directly to those he ‘adopted’, one can easily imagine the plight of the rest of Telangana. It’s time the CM and his BRS party are taught an unforgettable lesson on 30 November,” he told ThePrint.
For his part, Anjaneyulu acknowledges the villagers’ grievances as genuine but adds that it’s not all bleak in the village.
“The CM promised Rs 100 crore for the uplift of the village in all aspects. Rs 59 crore was sanctioned to the district authorities, including Rs 25 crore for new houses. But the house construction works are yet to begin for various reasons like procedural delays,” says Pogula, adding that other infrastructure projects are also underway.
While releasing the party’s manifesto this year, BRS chief KCR promised to increase pensions under the Aasara scheme to Rs 5,000 per month from the current Rs 2,000 in a phased manner. His son, BRS working president K.T. Rama Rao, meanwhile, has promised voters that those “previously uncovered will also be brought under the welfare ambit”. This would include issuing new ration cards from January 2024.
Despite some of these assurances, villagers like Guntupalli Rajamani are not convinced. Rajamani, who lives at the far end of the village, wonders what happened to KCR’s promise of intiki oka udyogam — or the CM’s 2016 promise of 1 lakh government jobs for the state’s youth “in the next three years”. The CM eventually denied making such a promise.
Her 32-year-old postgraduate son, Rajesh, is once again preparing for government recruitment exams after some of them were cancelled following question paper leaks earlier this year. Her second son, she says, is “a graduate employed as a driver.”
“The only favor he did for us women was sparing us from the kitchen for a day,” Guntupalli says, recalling a grand lunch the CM hosted for everyone in the village in June 2021.
ThePrint reached senior CMO officials over the telephone and via text messages for comment on the construction of new houses in Vasalamarri. This report will be updated when they respond.
Lack of govt jobs, housing — what ails Vasalamarri
The lunch that Rajamani was referring to was a grand affair held on 22 June at a 20-acre farmland, with 23 vegetarian and non-vegetarian dishes. In the mega grama sabha, KCR reportedly proposed ‘Mission Bangaru (Golden) Vasalamarri’ and said the whole village had become his family.
However, according to villagers, there has not been much progress since then. “Ask us what problem we don’t have,” says an annoyed Narasimhulu Poola, quoted earlier. “We are facing troubles with Dharani too.”
Dharani is the BRS government’s integrated land records system. Launched in October 2020 as part of its reforms in land administration, the portal has become a major bone of contention this election, with rivals Congress and the BJP both promising to abolish it if they come to power.
Several people ThePrint spoke to elsewhere in Telangana say their applications for houses under the state government’s Two-Bedroom (2BHK) Housing Scheme, also known as the Dignity Housing Scheme, have either been rejected or are pending with the authorities.
Launched in 2015, the scheme aimed at providing affordable housing to provide housing to 5.72 lakh underprivileged families in the state. According to sources in the CMO, the government has now built 1.43 lakh such houses. But Akunuri Murali of Jago Telangana believes the number is “grossly inadequate”.
“KCR has left many applicants in the lurch,” says Murali.
Sarpanch Anjaneyulu concedes that villagers have reason to be upset. “My house is also partly broken,” he says, but quickly adds that several development projects are also underway in the village.
“Construction of a new school building, a health centre, and anganwadi centres are underway, whereas a newly built substation has ended our low-voltage power problem,” Pogula says, adding, “About Rs 30 crore is allocated for infrastructure — roads, underground drainage, drinking water, and electricity supply.”
Why Vasalamarri
Vasalamarri is not part of KCR’s constituency, Gajwel, or his home turf, Siddipet district. Instead, it comes under the Alair assembly in Yadadri Bhuvanagiri district, lies 60 km northeast of the state capital Hyderabad, and is 15 km from KCR’s farmhouse at Erravalli.
It was from this village that KCR chose to launch his new SC empowerment scheme, Dalit Bandhu, in 2021, just ahead of the bypolls in Huzurabad assembly constituency.
Under the Dalit Bandhu scheme, the state government promised to provide financial assistance to the state’s 10 lakh Dalit families to set up their own businesses. Among the first beneficiaries of the scheme were the Vasalamarri village’s 76 Dalit families.
According to sarpanch Pogula, the village falls on the route that the CM takes to visit the Sri Lakshmi Narasimha Swamy Temple at Yadadari and other places such as Jangaon district.
“On one such tour, he was intrigued and enquired about the state of affairs here (in the village). We were called to the farmhouse one day three years back and he conveyed his decision to adopt our village,” Pogula tells ThePrint.
He hopes that the BRS will retain power in the state.
“We expect to meet CM KCR soon to press for the speedy construction of houses,” the sarpanch says.
(Edited by Uttara Ramaswamy)