How Vote-Bank Delimitation Is Undermining the City’s Governance
By Sumiran Komarraju
Hyderabad has established itself as a hub for global companies, positioning itself among India’s most dynamic centres for technology, pharmaceuticals, and research. As the city expands in every direction and attracts international attention, a familiar Congress tactic has resurfaced—this time disguised as administrative reform.
In theory, reform should mean better governance, improved service delivery, rational planning, and democratic consultation. What Hyderabad is witnessing today reflects none of these principles. Instead, it is political engineering through municipal delimitation, carried out at the direct cost of the city’s future.
The Congress government has merged 27 urban municipalities into the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC), expanding the city’s jurisdiction from roughly 625 square kilometres to over 2,000 square kilometres. These additions span Medchal–Malkajgiri, Rangareddy, and Sangareddy districts, dramatically altering the civic and political landscape of Telangana’s capital region.
This expansion was executed through official notifications, without meaningful consultation with elected representatives, without publicly released population, fiscal, or infrastructure modelling, and without any phased administrative transition plan. This is not routine governance. It is a structural intervention with immediate and long-term political consequences.
Alongside this territorial expansion, the government has doubled the number of municipal wards from 150 to 300 and increased the number of mayors from one to three. This redrawing of the municipal map was rushed through within days of the merger, without a transparent population parity framework or a clearly articulated representational logic. Elected representatives from the 27 merged municipalities—covering nearly half of the expanded GHMC area—were entirely excluded from the process.
The city’s democratic mandate is being reshaped not through deliberation, but through arithmetic.
The effects are visible in how ward boundaries are being structured. In the core GHMC areas, particularly in the Old City, boundaries appear carefully preserved and reworked to protect established vote banks. In contrast, within the newly merged municipalities, neighbourhoods are split, clubbed, or diluted in ways that disrupt political coherence.
Opposition-supporting localities are divided across multiple wards. Demographically distinct areas are forcibly fused. Natural boundaries, revenue jurisdictions, and long-standing local identities are overridden. This is not neutral delimitation; it is electoral engineering.
Such outcomes are not without precedent. From the imbalances inherited at Independence to politically driven delimitation exercises in undivided Andhra Pradesh under Congress rule, boundary-making for electoral ends has repeatedly produced instability rather than integration.
Congress’s historical reliance on appeasement politics as an organising principle is well documented, and the execution of this exercise follows that familiar pattern. Recent public remarks by the current Chief Minister—explicitly framing the party’s political identity in minority terms—reinforce this interpretation by anchoring political strategy in communal arithmetic rather than civic governance.
The parallels with the approach adopted during Y. S. Rajasekhar Reddy’s tenure in undivided Andhra Pradesh, when Hyderabad’s administrative boundaries and planning decisions were leveraged for electoral consolidation, are difficult to ignore. By embedding demographic and communal imbalance into ward structures, the present exercise distorts political representation and weakens institutional accountability.
Governance becomes contingent on bloc control rather than service delivery, fiscal discipline, or long-term urban planning—conditions essential for Hyderabad to function as a genuinely global city. When ward boundaries consistently concentrate power within a single political or communal bloc, institutional checks weaken, and enforcement becomes selective rather than uniform.
Decision-making follows numerical dominance, not civic necessity.
The risks are not abstract. Hyderabad already struggles with traffic gridlock, routine flooding, unreliable water supply, outdated drainage networks, sewage overflows, chronic congestion, and deteriorating road infrastructure. Yet instead of addressing these systemic failures, the government’s priority has been redrawing lines on a map.
There has been no publicly disclosed financial modelling for administering a 2,000-square-kilometre GHMC, no serious assessment of manpower requirements, no transport integration plan, and no environmental impact study. The municipal corporation is being treated less as a civic institution and more as an instrument for political control and real estate expansion. Citizens inherit administrative complexity; insiders inherit opportunity.
Urban governance has been reduced to spectacle. Summits substitute for strategy, publicity replaces planning, and headline management masquerades as reform. The Rising Telangana Summit offered optics without an urban roadmap. Celebrity appearances became theatre for a city struggling with drains, buses, and water supply.
Hyderabad today is being split into two realities. One is a curated, camera-ready metropolis marketed through select western corridors. The other is the lived city—merged municipalities, overcrowded cores, neglected peripheries, and unplanned colonies—abandoned by serious governance.
This duality is not accidental. It is the product of deliberate political design.
At a time when global attention increasingly turns to BJP-led administrations in India for examples of infrastructure-driven growth, regulatory predictability, and administrative capacity, the present Congress regime has moved Hyderabad in the opposite direction.
Global cities such as London, Paris, Sydney, and Brussels offer cautionary lessons on how sustained governance failure combined with demographic imbalance can fuel social fragmentation, insecurity, and uneven civic outcomes. Yet Hyderabad is being cut, carved, and politically recalibrated.
This is not merely an administrative failure. It is a warning.
Hyderabad is not Congress property. It is not AIMIM territory. It belongs to its people. (The author is Convenor, BJP social media, Telangana).
Let the government be non biased and impartial. Take public into confidence before embarking on new developments what so ever.