With deficient rains already shrinking sown acreage across Telangana, Chief Minister Revanth Reddy on Thursday, 30 July 2026 received a formal expert-committee report on El Niño impacts and immediately directed the Agriculture Department to pivot the state's farming strategy — pushing vegetables, millets, pulses and oilseeds over water-hungry crops, and promising seeds at a 75 percent subsidy.

The report that landed on the CM's desk

The expert committee, chaired by Telangana State Planning Commission Vice Chairman G. Chinnareddy, presented its findings at the Bodhi Pavilion, MCR HRD Institute, Hyderabad. The report maps El Niño-linked rainfall deficits, documents the resulting fall in cultivated area this season, and lays out an emergency action framework — village by village. It recommends promoting pulses, oilseeds, millets and vegetables as alternatives to paddy, extending 75 percent subsidised seeds to farmers who make the switch, and sanctioning fresh crop loans specifically for alternative crops.

The committee also called for deploying agricultural university scientists as technical advisers to farmers on the ground — a recognition that input subsidies alone rarely change cropping behaviour without hand-holding at the field level.

Vegetable farms feeding school kitchens

One of the sharper directives to emerge from the meeting: the state's newly constructed Centralised Kitchens — built to supply breakfast and mid-day meals to government school students — should anchor a local vegetable supply chain. CM Revanth Reddy instructed officials to encourage vegetable cultivation in the areas surrounding these kitchens, creating a captive, government-backed demand channel for small growers. It is a practical loop: drought-resilient crops grown close to schools, bought directly by the government, reducing both farmer risk and supply-chain cost.

Extension officers, Rythu Bazars and dairy units

The CM directed the Agriculture Department to post extension officers in affected divisions to run farmer-awareness programmes on organic cultivation of vegetables and other crops. Direct procurement from farmers — cutting out middlemen — was flagged as a priority. The committee's report separately recommended improving transport links between Hyderabad-periphery villages and Rythu Bazars, the state's direct-marketing outlets, so that vegetable growers can actually move produce to buyers. It also called for financial support to set up dairy units in rural areas as an additional income buffer, and for village-level monitoring teams to track emergency measure implementation in real time.

Telangana has run the Rythu Bandhu income-support scheme for farmers since 2018, and has periodically nudged cultivation away from paddy during drought years — but the scale and specificity of this committee's village-wise emergency planning marks a more structured response to climate stress than earlier seasonal advisories. The next test is whether the 75 percent seed subsidy and new crop loans reach farmers before the next sowing window closes.