How government managed to achieve so much in so little time
On December 13, 2025, Chief Minister Revanth Reddy pulled on a jersey with the number 9 on it and walked out onto a football pitch in Uppal to play alongside Lionel Messi, wearing his own famous 10. It was a strange, slightly surreal evening as Argentina’s greatest export took penalties against a sitting Indian Chief Minister in front of a packed audience at the Rajiv Gandhi International Stadium.
Cynics called it a photo-op. But it told you something about the mood inside this government at the 1,000-day mark, a willingness to think bigger than most State governments usually do, to put Telangana on a stage that most States don’t get invited to.
A few months prior, in May 2025, came Miss World, the month-long pageant Hyderabad hosted, the one that put “Telangana Zaroor Aana” on billboards from London to Los Angeles and turned the State itself into the pitch.
This kind of spectacle is easy to notice. What’s harder to see, and honestly more important, is what has been happening underneath it in the last close-to-three years.
Rythe Raju – proven in words and deeds
Take Rythu Bharosa. In its recent cycle alone, Rs. 9,000 crore was credited directly into the bank accounts of 73.30 lakh farmers without involving any middlemen, and no form waiting to be cleared at a government office.
Pair that with the Rythu Runa Mafi loan waiver, which cleared more than Rs. 21,000 crore in debt for 25 lakh farming families, and you start to see a pattern rather than a scheme.
We aren’t talking about just “one good policy” that keeps hitting the headlines. It’s about turning the spotlight on a government which decided that agriculture gets precedence over other listed items in the State’s Budget, and then kept writing the cheques to prove it, season after season.
Women power to the fore
The Mahalakshmi free bus scheme tells a similar story from a different angle. More than 35 lakh women now use it every single day, and the government’s own numbers put the cumulative savings at over Rs. 10,000 crore. The share of women riding TGSRTC buses jumped from 40 percent to 67 per cent, which is not a small shift. It’s basically a redesign of who gets to move freely around this State without thinking twice about the fare.
And here’s the part that should surprise people who assume free schemes bleed a transport corporation dry. TGSRTC actually turned a surplus of over Rs. 1,059 crore after a decade of losses. Somehow the free rides ended up paying for themselves in ridership and reform.
Koti Mahila Koteeswarulu, on the other hand, is the government’s promise that at least one crore women already part of Self-Help Groups in Telangana will become successful entrepreneurs and millionaires in their own right. Initiatives such as allocating petrol bunks, EV buses, 1,000 KW solar power plants to women’s groups, besides contracts for school uniforms’ stitching and Bathukamma sarees’ weaving, prove that Chief Minister Revanth Reddy’s intentions are tied to the path of progress.
But the list of Congress government’s achievements is incomplete without the mention of the 2BHK housing initiative. What ‘Indiramma Indlu’ does goes beyond “building a house”. It puts the deed in a woman’s name, so the Rs. 5 lakh she gets becomes not just a roof over her head but also something concrete that she actually owns.
Cultural context: Giving excellence its due
There’s also the not-so-showy cultural work – something that doesn’t usually show up in Budget documents but probably shows how a State sees itself. The Telangana Thalli statue, redesigned as a working woman rather than a crowned goddess, now stands in the Secretariat and at all 33 district Collectorates. Ande Sri’s ‘Jaya Jaya He Telangana’ has been carried forward as the State’s own song, played at nearly every major government function. Then there is the Telangana Gaddar Film Awards (TGFA), the annual awards instituted by the Telangana Government to honour excellence in Telugu cinema.
And in Hanamkonda, the Kaloji Kalakshetram, a cultural centre whose foundation was actually laid back in 2014 and then sat unfinished for a decade, finally opened its doors in memory of the poet Kaloji Narayana Rao. Sometimes, governance is just finishing what someone else started and giving an artist the respect due to him/her.
Work overtime, follow through, catch up, repeat!
Yes, the government’s report card may not be completely or clinically spotless. Anyone reading through the list of a thousand-odd achievements will notice how the government machinery is working overtime even where the on-ground follow-through is still catching up.
Land record complaints under Bhu Bharati haven’t fully disappeared. Big-ticket promises like the Musi Rejuvenation are still in the planning and catchment-development stage.
But step back from the individual line items and the direction is hard to argue with. Investment commitments crossing Rs. 9.3 lakh crore, Aarogyasri health cover doubled to Rs. 10 lakh, HYDRAA reclaiming over a 1,000 acres of encroached government land assets worth an estimated over Rs. 60,000 crore, and a comprehensive caste census actually completed and used to shape future welfare measures.
Telangana Rising Vision 2047, unveiled at the Global Summit in Bharat Future City, charts Telangana’s journey to a $3 trillion economy through the CURE-PURE-RARE model of balanced urban, industrial and rural growth. The State’s economy grew by about 10.7% in 2025-26, outpacing the national average, with a current contribution of 5% to India’s total GDP.
Now, this is what a government that did more on more issues in under three years looks like! And this is surely more than most governments manage in a full term.
A thousand days isn’t long in the life of a State. Telangana used it anyway, from a farmer’s bank account to a football pitch shared with the best player of his generation. And if this pace holds for the next thousand, which is the real test ahead, then there is no looking back and no stopping them!