Bhatti says Telangana rising strong like phoenix again
Finance Minister Vikramarka faces tough choices, balancing growth, jobs push, and funding six key poll guarantees without stretching finances too far
The morning light filtered through the windows of the Nalla Pochamma Temple in Hyderabad as Bhatti Vikramarka Mallu bowed his head in prayer. For a moment, the deputy chief minister and finance minister of Telangana was not a politician surrounded by aides and security personnel. He was simply a man seeking blessings before one of the most consequential days of his career. In a few hours, he would stand before the Legislative Assembly and present a budget that would shape the lives of nearly four crore people—farmers waiting for assured income, mothers hoping for continued support, young people desperate for jobs, and entrepreneurs looking for signs that the state means business.
The weight of those expectations followed him from the temple steps to the Assembly, where finance department officials—Principal Secretary Sandeep Kumar Sultania and Secretary Gaurav Uppal among them—greeted him with the quiet efficiency of people who had spent months crunching numbers, preparing for this moment. They knew, as Vikramarka knew, that this budget was not just about fiscal aggregates. It was about trust.
Inside the Assembly Committee Hall, chief minister Revanth Reddy presided over a cabinet meeting that would approve the budget before its formal presentation. The conversations around that table were not merely about expenditure ceilings and revenue projections. They were about the promises made during long campaign trails, the faces of villagers who had gathered under banyan trees to hear guarantees, the women who had clutched their ration cards with hope. Two years into the Congress government’s term, those promises were now up for accounting.
Governor Shiv Pratap Shukla had set the tone earlier in the day, speaking of inclusive growth and noting that Telangana’s projected Gross State Domestic Product for 2025–26 stood at Rs 17.82 lakh crore. Behind that impressive figure lay a more complicated story—one of careful navigation through global headwinds, of balancing the books while keeping faith with voters who had placed their trust in a new administration after a decade of rule by the opposition.
When Vikramarka rose to speak in the Assembly, the numbers he laid out told a story of ambition tempered by realism. The budget outlay would rise to approximately Rs 3.2 lakh crore, a 7 percent increase from the previous year’s Rs 3.04 lakh crore. But within those figures lay the real substance. More than Rs 56,000 crore had been earmarked in the previous budget for the six poll guarantees that had become synonymous with the Congress campaign—schemes that put money directly into the hands of farmers, women, and vulnerable families. The challenge now was to sustain those commitments while managing open market borrowings projected at nearly Rs 64,000 crore.
He spoke of rectifying the mistakes of the previous regime, a phrase that carried both political weight and genuine administrative significance. Repaying debts left behind, he said, was part of the work. But so was attracting record investments, creating the conditions for industries to plant their flags in Telangana soil, and ensuring that the state’s youth—restless and ambitious—found opportunities that would keep them from looking elsewhere for work.
“We have prepared a budget aimed at serving the people,” he told the Assembly, acknowledging the global challenges that had made governing in these times a test of nerve and creativity. Farmers’ welfare, women’s empowerment, skill-based education, infrastructure development—these were not just bullet points in a budget speech. They were the axes on which the government hoped to turn the state’s fortunes.
Outside the Assembly, the city of Hyderabad went about its business with the usual Friday rhythm. Office workers navigated traffic, students prepared for exams, small traders counted their daily earnings. Most would not read the budget documents or track the fiscal ratios. But they would feel the impact in the months to come—in the money that reached their bank accounts, in the roads that were repaired, in the job opportunities that materialized, or failed to.
For Vikramarka, who had begun his day at the temple with folded hands, the task was to translate those prayers into policy. The budget was his answer. Now it was in the hands of the people it was meant to serve.