BRS working president K. T. Rama Rao on Wednesday, 1 July 2026, shared photographs from a free eye camp organised by BRS cadre at Veernapally Mandal in Rajanna Sircilla district, framing the initiative as a grassroots extension of former Chief Minister K. Chandrashekar Rao's flagship Kanti Velugu eye-care programme.

Context

Posting four photographs from the camp, KTR wrote: 'The joy of giving the gift of better vision and the joy of taking KCR garu's vision ahead, one mandal at a time.' He said the Sircilla event was not a one-off, announcing that BRS cadre plan to roll out eye camps across the district offering free check-ups, spectacles, and surgeries wherever required. He also claimed that school children were covered under the Kanti Velugu framework 'for the first time' at this camp.

Rajanna Sircilla is a district closely associated with KTR, who represented it in the Telangana Legislative Assembly across multiple terms. The district has continued to be a focus of BRS organisational activity following the party's defeat in the December 2023 assembly elections.

Policy Backdrop

The Kanti Velugu scheme was launched by the then Telangana government in June 2018 to provide universal eye screening, free spectacles, and cataract surgeries to residents across the state. A second phase, announced in 2022–23, sought to deepen coverage and include school-level screenings before the change of government.

With BRS now in opposition after losing power to the Indian National Congress in Telangana, the party has increasingly used cadre-led welfare camps — mirroring its own erstwhile flagship schemes — as a mechanism to maintain rural voter contact. Similar health and welfare outreach drives have been reported by BRS workers in other former stronghold districts across Telangana.

Stakeholders and Impact

The immediate beneficiaries of the Veernapally Mandal camp are rural residents and school children in Sircilla district who received free vision screening. The broader political constituency is the rural voter base that BRS cultivated during its decade in government and is now working to retain through party-delivered services.

For the ruling government in Hyderabad, the BRS initiative raises a political question: whether to allow the opposition to occupy the welfare-delivery space associated with Kanti Velugu, or to assert the state's own eye-care programmes more visibly in districts like Sircilla.

What's Next

KTR has signalled that the Sircilla model will be replicated across the district, with future camps providing free check-ups, glasses, and surgical interventions. The key variable is whether BRS can sustain cadre mobilisation and funding for this kind of district-wide rollout, and whether the state government responds with a competing or complementary public-health push of its own.

The eye-camp series also sets a template that other BRS-held districts may follow, making Veernapally Mandal an early test case for the party's opposition-era welfare strategy ahead of future electoral cycles in Telangana.