​Renewed hope: On the meeting between the Chief Ministers of Telangana, Andhra Pradesh

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After a decade of acrimony, the return to cordial relations between the governments and Chief Ministers of the two Telugu-speaking States is welcome. At stake are the futures of heavily intertwined and socially cohesive communities of two large economies contributing significantly to India’s GDP and employment numbers. The Chief Ministers of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, N. Chandrababu Naidu and A. Revanth Reddy, respectively, not only remained cordial throughout the two-hour long meeting in Hyderabad last week but also proposed a well-thought-out three tier-mechanism to resolve all outstanding issues since the creation of Telangana in 2014. The first tier is a committee of top administrative officials, three members from each State, which would meet at regular intervals and attempt resolutions of as many disputes as possible. There would be sub-groups within this committee to address sectoral issues such as water sharing, assets and liabilities distribution, and the return of the five villages in the erstwhile Khammam district that were merged with Andhra Pradesh as they were expected to be submerged by the Polavaram Irrigation project. The second tier consists of a similar committee of three Ministers from each State, which would attempt to resolve issues that could not be resolved at the bureaucratic level. And, finally, the third tier consists of the Chief Ministers themselves who would intervene on the most hardened positions.

In the first five years since Telangana’s formation, these issues festered to a point of no return, as much bad blood remained over the carving out of the richest part of undivided Andhra Pradesh into a new State, and the political futures of the legatee regional parties – K. Chandrashekhar Rao’s Telangana Rashtra Samithi/Bharat Rashtra Samithi, and Mr. Naidu’s Telugu Desam Party (TDP) — depended to a degree on public posturing, much to the detriment of the smooth day-to-day governance of the two new States. The abrupt stoppage of power supply by Andhra Pradesh to Telangana in 2017, leading Telangana to enter into expensive power purchase agreements with other neighbouring States is a case in point. But now, with Mr. Revanth Reddy, who looks up to Mr. Naidu as a political mentor — he groomed him from his early days as an independent MLC 17 years ago, and prodded him to join the TDP — there is hope that the two leaders would do what is right by the peoples of their States.