Future City, Present Tense: The Family-Interest District

Bharat Future City is being sold as Telangana’s next global technology capital. For now, its most advanced technology is converting a government-land controversy into a legislative housekeeping exercise. Five acres at Raviryala were allotted for about ₹7 crore to Tesseract Advanced Systems, a company publicly linked to Chief Minister A Revanth Reddy’s brother, Anumula Kondal Reddy. The BRS says the land is worth more than ₹100 crore; K T Rama Rao has cited a figure of about ₹200 crore. The government says officials followed due process and the Chief Minister was not involved. This is transparency with the important pages removed.

Industries Minister D Sridhar Babu’s defence added a second floor to the building. He denied that Kondal Reddy was linked to Tesseract, despite public references identifying him as its chairman. The government’s position therefore managed to become two positions at once: the family connection does not exist, and the allotment is entirely proper even if it does. Congress has discovered a new administrative category — an invisible relationship with a visible beneficiary.

The Opposition asked for a discussion. The Council saw a walkout. In the Assembly, BRS MLAs were suspended after trying to raise the issue. The government has not put the full explanation into the public domain, but it has displayed its preferred version of accountability: questions are welcome, provided they leave before the answers begin. KTR’s political attack may be partisan, as political attacks tend to be. That does not make disclosure optional. Public land is not a family WhatsApp group where the important messages disappear after being read.

No one is arguing that a company becomes automatically ineligible because a minister’s relative is associated with it. The argument is simpler and more inconvenient: publish the file, explain the valuation, disclose the relationship and allow independent scrutiny. A government that promised a clean break from the past should not require citizens to distinguish between “official process” and “officials processing a family-shaped benefit”.

The Future City may still become world-class. Its first landmark is already operational: a ₹7-crore answer to a ₹200-crore question.