Ten years of lost opportunity — that is how Chief Minister Revanth Reddy framed Telangana's rural housing deficit when he sat down with Union Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan at Krishi Bhavan, New Delhi, on Tuesday, 28 July 2026. The Congress government is now pushing hard to recover that ground, formally requesting the Centre to allocate 11.56 lakh houses under the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana-Gramin (PMAY-G).

A decade of unmet demand, now on the Centre's desk

The Chief Minister's Office of Telangana stated that the previous state government failed to utilise PMAY-G allocations over the past ten years, leaving rural poor families without pucca homes. The current administration used the Centre's own Awaas+ app — a beneficiary-survey tool developed by the Ministry of Rural Development — to conduct a fresh enumeration. That survey identified 11,56,915 eligible rural families across the state. CM Revanth presented this figure directly to Minister Chouhan, urging the earliest possible allocation.

The meeting was part of a broader Delhi visit in which the Chief Minister was accompanied by eight Members of Parliament and senior officials including Ex-Officio Special Secretary K. Ramakrishna Rao and Secretary (Coordination) Advait Kumar Singh. The multi-MP delegation was a deliberate signal of political weight behind the demand.

Indiramma Indlu and the state's housing push

CM Revanth briefed Chouhan on Indiramma Indlu, the state's flagship rural housing programme launched after the Congress government took office in December 2023. The scheme is designed to dovetail with PMAY-G, and the state wants central sanction to unlock the full pipeline. Without fresh central allocations, the programme cannot scale to meet the backlog the survey has now documented.

The Chief Minister also reminded the Union Minister that under MGNREGS, beneficiaries of housing schemes were previously entitled to up to 90 days of wage work during construction. He urged that the same convergence be permitted under the Viksit Bharat Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) — VBGRAMG, the newer employment framework, so that house-building itself becomes a source of guaranteed income for the rural poor.

El Niño, drought, and the case for expanded rural works

Beyond housing, the CM made a pointed case for expanding the basket of permissible works under VBGRAMG in light of El Niño-driven rainfall deficits hitting Telangana's agricultural districts. He requested that works such as vegetable pandals, fodder plots, mulberry plantation and sericulture sheds, bamboo groves, moisture-conservation trenches on hill slopes, and rehabilitation of flood- and sand-silt-damaged farmland be added to the scheme's approved list.

The ask is explicitly targeted at the state's most vulnerable — SC and ST communities, small and marginal farmers, and agricultural labourers — who lose wage income when the monsoon fails. Crop diversification support, the CM argued, needs to be embedded in the employment guarantee framework itself, not treated as a separate agricultural intervention.

Chouhan's response and an invitation to Telangana

The Chief Minister's Office said Chouhan responded positively to the concerns raised on both Indiramma Indlu and employment works. CM Revanth also extended a formal invitation to the Union Minister to visit Telangana for a ground-level assessment of conditions — a move that, if accepted, would keep the pressure on the Centre to act.

The ball is now in New Delhi's court. A formal central sanction for 11.56 lakh houses would be one of the largest single-state allocations under PMAY-G in recent years — and for Telangana's rural poor, long overdue.