The numbers story: Telangana fares better than Seemandhra in development
Was the Telangana region treated as a stepchild? We have analyzed data from 42 constituencies in AP.
TRS President K Chandrasekhar Rao pays tribute to Telangana Talli at Telangana Bhavan in Htyderabad. (PTI photo)
The state of Andhra Pradesh will be bifurcated in the coming months after both the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha passed the Telangana Bill in February.
“Lack of development” was one of the many props used to support the demand for a separate state. Telangana agitators allege that they were made to walk the plank by the Andhra Pradesh government.
We at The Indian Express have analysed data from the 42 parliament constituencies in Andhra Pradesh to find out whether the Telangana region was treated as a stepchild.
We used the parameters health, literacy, electricity, roads, and funds utilised by MPs from the Local Area Development scheme. The health indicator refers to children who are fully immunized when they are aged between 9-11 months. Roads indicate rural areas connected to cities by pucca roads. Hence, urban areas like Hyderabad and Secunderabad registered null under Roads.
There are 42 parliamentary constituencies in Andhra Pradesh. 17 are in Telangana and 25 in Seemandhra. A MP elected between 2009-13 can spend Rs 19 crore in his/her five-year term. Under the MPLAD scheme, a MP can spend Rs 2 crore per year but this was raised to Rs 5 crore in 2011. The MPLADS figures used for this story are until November 30.
We divided the state into two regions, Telangana and Seemandhra, to see how they fared in the last five years.
The highlighted constituencies, Mahabubnagar and Medak, are represented by MPs from the Telangana Rashtra Samithi party. As you can see only 65% of the funds from MPLADS was used in Mahabubnagar by the TRS party president K. Chandrasekhar Rao. And former film actress Vijayashanti represents Medak. The literacy rate is the second lowest in Medak in the Telangana Region.
Vijayawada, which could be developed as the next capital for Seemandhra, pales in comparison with Hyderabad.
The averages of all the development parameters used in this study have been divided into two categories. First category: Telangana with Hyderabad. Second category: Telangana without Hyderabad, meaning we have left out Hyderabad, Secunderabad and Malkajgiri from the constituencies list.
The averages of all the constituencies in Seemandhra, which have been divided into Seemandhra with the state capital and Seemandhra without the state capital.
Elaborating further, we have pulled the numbers from the above graphs and directly compared Seemandhra with Telangana (Hyderabad).
At face value, if health, literacy, electricity, roads and funds used by MPs are used to measure development, then Telangana is marginally better off than Seemandhra as the numbers above would suggest. However, we haven’t included factors like number of irrigation projects, number of schools and colleges, number of hospitals, etc since the numbers are beyond the means of this article.
Disclaimer: The graphs above do not contain numbers from the 15th Lok Sabha Winter Session. All figures were provide by PRS Legislative, ADR and Indicus.
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