New Delhi: Ahead of the Assembly election early next year, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath is tightening the screws on officials whom he finds lackadaisical. Grapevine has it that he recently ticked off a senior IAS officer, considered close to him, at a meeting to review the flood situation in the state.
The absence of a senior official from the irrigation department, which plays a key role in flood management, was said to have upset the chief minister.
Yogi asked why the senior official had not been called. When he sought an explanation from his close aide, a powerful IAS officer who heads several departments, the latter fumbled for an answer.
”If you don’t have the information, then what have you come to the meeting for?” the CM asked in a firm voice. He warned that if such lapses continued, ”everyone will be changed”.
At the next meeting, the CM instructed that officers at all levels, from the state headquarters to the districts, must join the meetings at least ”10 minutes before the scheduled time”.
A senior official at the Chief Minister’s Office said that big changes in the bureaucracy could happen in the coming days.
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Yet another CM turns to gods for rainfall
It is not the first time that El Niño, the natural climate phenomenon that disrupts weather, rainfall, and agricultural patterns, has scorched India, heating homes and drying up wells.
But even as scientists at the India Meteorological Department (IMD) spend the extended summer staring at satellite imagery, politicians in Telangana prefer turning to the skies with hymns and chants.
If there’s one ritual the political class has continued in Telangana even after its bifurcation from Andhra Pradesh, it is the conduct of the mighty Varuna Yagna, an elaborate ritual touted as the ultimate solution to a delayed monsoon.
The mammoth Rs 1 lakh-crore Kaleshwaram Lift Irrigation Scheme (KLIS) might need an uplift, or a reservoir might need desilting; but successive governments have routinely concluded that the best way to manage water scarcity is to outsource the state’s meteorology to the gods, transforming state-sponsored prayer into a substitute for sound engineering.
This ritualistic, time-honoured, bipartisan tradition bridging undivided Andhra Pradesh and modern Telangana was even followed by the late Chief Minister Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy from his first term in 2004.
He famously backed massive, multi-faith prayer sessions when the clouds failed him, proving that even a modern administrator could appreciate a spiritual backup plan.
Not to be outdone, his fierce rival N. Chandrababu Naidu once greenlit an official request to perform Varuna Yagnas across temple-dense districts, blending his tech-savvy, “Cyberabad” persona with an old-school desire for divine intervention.
When the state split, the ritual only got grander. Former chief minister K. Chandrashekar Rao elevated the practice to an art form, hosting sprawling, multi-crore yagnas with hundreds of priests.
While his administration continues to pitch the KLIS as a modern engineering marvel, the frequent recourse to sacred smoke suggests a lingering lack of confidence in the concrete. The current Congress administration under A. Revanth Reddy inherits this heavy spiritual legacy, where any failure of the monsoon immediately puts pressure on the state to start chanting.
Even as retired IAS officers who earlier held the irrigation portfolio repeatedly requested the release of water from the Kannepalli reservoir—since it was one of the few holding a significant amount for drinking and farm needs—Revanth Reddy preferred asking priests from the famed Chilukur Balaji temple to let the hymns flow flawlessly.
Irrigation Minister N Uttam Reddy has been asked to oversee the yagna, while the CM is expected to grace the final “purnahuti” ritual. The political class has joked that the temple boards across the state would get richer even as structural defects in multi-crore pumping stations and crumbling canal networks await repair.
As for the citizens, they are left with a familiar summer routine: watching politicians pray for rain to fill reservoirs that are often poorly maintained.
(Edited by Ajeet Tiwari)
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