Revanth’s Transparency Comes With a Blackout Function

The Revanth Reddy government has discovered the perfect Future City investment: a future in which nobody can find the allotment file. The dispute concerns five acres at Raviryala, near the proposed project. The BRS alleges that land worth roughly ₹200–250 crore was allotted to Tesseract Advanced Systems for ₹7 crore and has linked the company to Chief Minister Revanth Reddy’s brother, Anumula Kondal Reddy. Those are allegations, not established findings. The government denies them. So far, the state has offered a denial where the public might reasonably have expected documents.

Industries Minister D Sridhar Babu said Tesseract has “no connection whatsoever” with the Chief Minister’s brother and that the allotment was transparently approved by the Consultative Committee on Electronics System Design & Manufacturing. This is an inventive definition of transparency: everyone is told that the process was transparent, but nobody is shown the allotment order, valuation report, survey details or sale or lease document. The file remains unavailable, while the adjective has been made available in bulk.

When the matter reached the Legislative Council on September 10, the government declined a discussion, the BRS walked out, and a paper alleging wrongful allotments was held up during the live telecast before the camera turned elsewhere. Telangana’s Congress government has apparently modernised the old blacked-out document. It now comes with a press conference, a development slogan and a carefully managed viewing angle.

The Congress arrived promising clean administration and a government for ordinary Telangana. It now asks the public to admire the vocabulary: Future City, strategic electronics, global investment, transparent procedures. If the allegation is false, publishing the file would settle it. If the allotment is defensible, the valuation and terms should survive daylight. Instead, Revanth Reddy’s government has chosen the grander strategy of calling the charge “blatantly false”, blaming the BRS and BJP, and declining to let the House examine it.

A government that wants trust does not distribute assurances. It distributes records. The ₹7-crore transparency package contains everything except transparency.