Before the election, it was a 'Rythu Declaration' — a cascade of farmer-welfare promises. Today, BRS working president K. T. Rama Rao says, Telangana's farmers are being forced to sign a different kind of declaration: one where they pledge to protect their own crops with no help from the state. On Thursday, 29 October 2026, KTR took to X to deliver a sharp broadside at the ruling Congress government over what he described as an unprecedented breakdown in agricultural support.

In Telugu, KTR wrote: 'ఎన్నికలకు ముందు రైతు డిక్లరేషన్, ఇప్పుడేమో రైతుల సెల్ఫ్ డిక్లరేషన్' — 'Before elections, a Rythu Declaration; now a farmer self-declaration.' He alleged that Telangana's farmers have been pushed into a situation where they must fend for themselves — deploying private generators and water tankers to keep standing crops alive — because the state is failing to supply reliable power and irrigation.

Generators, Tankers and a 'Crop Holiday' Congress Can't Defend

The post's sharpest accusation centres on what KTR calls a 'crop holiday' — a term implying that the state has effectively absented itself from agricultural duty. He alleges that farmers across Telangana are running private diesel generators and sourcing water through tankers because canal and electricity supply has proved unreliable under the Indian National Congress government that swept to power after the 2023 Telangana assembly elections. The imagery is vivid and damning: a smallholder farmer, at his own expense, improvising infrastructure the government was elected to provide.

KTR's closing line carried the sting of an election slogan turned back on itself: 'It is this Congress government — the one that declared a crop holiday — that we must give a holiday.' The pun lands hard in a state where farm-distress rhetoric has driven electoral cycles for over a decade.

BRS's Rythu Bandhu Legacy vs. Congress's 2023 Promises

The political subtext runs deep. The Bharat Rashtra Samithi, which governed Telangana from 2014 to 2023, built its rural identity largely on the Rythu Bandhu investment-support scheme, launched in 2018, which provided direct per-acre cash transfers to farmers before each crop season. Congress entered the 2023 campaign with counter-promises of enhanced support prices and expanded welfare, and won. KTR's post is a pointed reminder — aimed at rural voters — that promises made before a declaration and conditions lived after one are two very different things.

The broader pattern here is well-established: every Telangana dry spell, power outage, or irrigation shortfall since December 2023 has become a theatre of BRS-Congress combat, with the opposition highlighting private workarounds as proof of government neglect and the ruling party contesting the framing. What makes this cycle notable is the specific framing of 'self-declaration' — bureaucratic language repurposed to expose what the opposition calls the hollowness of state intervention.

What the Telangana Agriculture Department Has Yet to Answer

As of now, there has been no official response from the Telangana agriculture department on KTR's specific claims about mandatory self-declarations or the crop-holiday announcement. The next assembly session and its irrigation and power-allocation debates will be closely watched for whether the Congress government addresses the crisis head-on or contests the opposition's characterisation of events on the ground.

For Telangana's farmers — already navigating erratic monsoons and input cost pressures — the political sparring matters only insofar as it translates into uninterrupted power and water at the field level. Until then, the generators keep running.