With standing crops across Telangana wilting under a drought-like sky and the El Niño weather pattern tightening its grip, Chief Minister A. Revanth Reddy summoned top officials on Wednesday, 14 October 2026, and delivered a blunt ultimatum: round-the-clock electricity for farmers — or face suspensions. The Chief Minister's Office of Telangana posted the full details of the high-level review, making clear that the next 20 days are critical for the state's standing crops.

The 20-day deadline — and a warning no official could miss

Revanth Reddy opened the review meeting with an unambiguous directive: power cuts must stop immediately and electricity supply to agriculture must continue day and night until harvests are safely in hand. 'Prajalu ku javabdaariganunnadii nenu' — 'I am the one accountable to the people,' he told officials — and warned that no excuse for disruption would be tolerated. He pointedly asked why repeated orders to stabilise supply had not translated into results on the ground.

The Chief Minister went further, threatening to suspend the Special Chief Secretary of the Power Department, the GENCO CMD, and the concerned IAS officers if breakdowns continued. 'Do not give a different reason for power outages every day,' he told the room. Officials were instructed to map high-demand agricultural zones and ramp up supply proportionally.

Yadadri plant in the crosshairs — coal linkages not delivering

A specific flashpoint was the Yadadri Thermal Power Station, Telangana's flagship coal-based plant. Despite coal supply linkages arranged from Naini and Mahanadi coalfields, the plant is not generating at full capacity — a gap the Chief Minister demanded be explained and closed immediately. The review exposed a disconnect between infrastructure commitments and on-ground delivery that officials struggled to justify.

El Niño declared a COVID-scale emergency

In arguably the meeting's most consequential framing, Revanth Reddy directed every government department to treat the El Niño-triggered drought conditions as a disaster on the scale of COVID-19. 'El Niño is a calamity like COVID. Nobody knows how long this situation will last. If we are not alert, what looks like a problem today will become a crisis,' he said. Each department was ordered to submit a 'watertight action plan' through to June next year — anticipating that rains may not return until then.

The framing carries institutional weight. Telangana has prior experience of multi-departmental crisis protocols during extreme weather, and invoking the COVID comparison signals that the government expects the same all-hands mobilisation — coordination across power, agriculture, revenue, health, municipal, panchayati raj, finance, and groundwater departments, all of whose senior officers attended the review alongside Chief Secretary Sanjay Jaju, MP Vem Narender Reddy, and CM Advisor K. Ramakrishna Rao.

Drinking water, cattle fodder, and treated sewage water for construction

Beyond crops, Revanth Reddy ordered officials to ensure uninterrupted drinking water supply across the state and to draft advance contingency plans. In a practical move for water conservation, Greater Hyderabad was instructed to use treated water from Sewage Treatment Plants (STPs) for construction and non-potable industrial needs, freeing up fresh water reserves. Special measures were also mandated to prevent a shortage of cattle fodder as El Niño stress spreads to livestock.

A monitoring officer for every mandal — and gram sabhas after Dasara

The government will deploy Group-1 and Group-2 level officers to every mandal in the state, giving each a dedicated responsibility to track rainfall deficits, power supply, drinking water, crop health, and fodder availability on a continuous basis. Field reports will flow directly to Chief Secretary Sanjay Jaju. The system is designed to eliminate the information gap between district realities and state-level decision-making.

On the public communication front, the Chief Minister ordered gram sabhas to be held across the state from after Dasara until Diwali, supplemented by kalajathas (awareness processions) to educate communities on El Niño's impact, water and electricity conservation, and precautions ahead of potential scarcity. The message is to go from village level to state level — no community left uninformed.

Telangana's farmers have seen drought-management commitments made and broken before. This time, the Chief Minister has put civil servants' careers on the line. Whether the machinery responds before crops fail will be the real test of whether a COVID-scale alert produces COVID-scale action.