460 villages, 2 towns in Telangana go missing

HYDERABAD: Even as plans are afoot to kick off Census 2021, names of 460 villages and two towns in Telangana have gone missing. The missing villages have been identified by the Union ministry of home affairs and Directorate of Census for Telangana and Andhra Pradesh during the pre-Census exercise.
Sources said the Centre and the directorate came across this discrepancy when they were going through the 2011 Census data.
These 460 villages are part of 14 newly-created districts, which were carved out in October 2016 when the TRS government rejigged the district map of the state.
The directorate has sent a missive to the Telangana government on the missing villages and sought a clarification. The villages that went missing are located in the erstwhile Adilabad, Khammam, Warangal, Karimnagar, Rangareddy, Mahbubnagar and Medak districts. Mahbubnagar and Rangareddy districts have the maximum number of missing villages. Names of two towns — Gadwal and Wanaparthy — are also missing.
Surprisingly, these villages in 58 mandals have been receiving benefits of government schemes. “But technically, they cannot be treated as revenue villages since their names don’t exist in the GOs issued by the government,” an official explained.
The authorities were in for another shock when they came across names of 36 villages which did not exist even in the Census 2011 data.
Senior officials blamed district revenue officers for omitting the names due to confusion over contours of mandal and village borders. “The missing names have been mainly found in the reorganised mandals,” a senior official pointed out.