After the 21 new districts became a reality on Vijaya Dasami day, the Telangana Planning Department officials are now busy assigning unique numerical code to all the districts, mandals and villages afresh.
The Planning Department and Telangana State Remote Sensing Application Centre officials have been working on preparing numerical code in line with guidelines of Census Board.
The proposals were sent to the Joint Director, Census Operations for vetting and formal approval.
The numerical code is expected to be released in a day or two.
Maps preparedThe Telangana State Remote Sensing Application Centre (TRAC) earlier prepared maps for all the districts, a prerequisite for giving the district code pending release of standard maps by the Survey of India.
According to Directorate of Economics and Statistics officers, there is a laid down pattern for allotting numerical code based on the district maps in a serpentine sequence starting from north west of the top most district - Adilabad.
During the preparation of numerical code, some overlapping of villages in some mandals of Nizamabad district came to the fore and that was being corrected.
Financial implicationsThe unique numerical code for districts and mandals is important because of the financial implications and required for Central programmes like NREGA where funds would be directly released into accounts of beneficiaries based on authenticated code.
Meanwhile, the Planning Department decided to utilise the surplus vacant place on the office premises of Chief Planning Officers in the eight erstwhile districts (except Hyderabad and Ranga Reddy) and set up regional centres of the TRAC.
These centres would provide geo-spatial inputs to District Collectors and other district officials and spread awareness on geo-spatial technology for asset mapping, resource mapping, geo-tagging of tanks etc.
RedesignatedThe Telangana State Development Planning Society which also monitors rainfall reallocated 821 automated rain gauges to the new mandals as part of the districts’ reorganisation.
Planning Department officials said unlike in the past where the focus was on data collection, now the focus would be on resource mapping in each mandal and accordingly the mandal-level officers were re-designated as Mandal Planning and Statistical Officers.
There are queries from new district collectors about Human Development Index right from mandal level, geo-tagging.
All the new district collectors were also given online access to intensive household survey data to improve service delivery.
It would become easy to monitor beneficiaries of housing schemes, pensions and other welfare schemes.
