Things go missing. People go missing. But entire villages going missing? It’s happened. Not literally, though. Just that some villages no longer exist in some government records. Here is how.
Telangana, which came into being in 2014, went for a major reorganisation of its districts in October 2016 — from the original 10, they went up to 31. This exercise had an interesting fallout. Around 450 villages went “missing.”
These included those that were located on the borders of two districts, or those that were removed from one mandal and appended to another. And then there were those villages whose names were changed after the formation of the State and the new districts.
The issue came to the fore when census officials went through the records during reconciliation of data pertaining to the 2011 census as part of the preparations for the next census. They found, for instance, Hakeempet and Polepally removed from the Bomraspet mandal of Vikarabad district and added to the Kosgi mandal of Mahabubnagar district. Similarly, the name of Choudergudem, under the Shadnagar revenue division of the reorganised Rangareddy district, had been changed to Jilled Choudergudem.
While gazette notifications were issued in January last confirming the changes, the same did not figure in the records of the Census Department. According to senior officials, the government had settled information pertaining to more than 350 villages so far, issuing notifications confirming their location and names. “But there are still around 70 villages which are yet to be accounted for,” a senior official told The Hindu .
A majority of such cases were reported from districts that were bifurcated, trifurcated or carved into four districts. Several of these instances were reported from Adilabad, Mancherial, Mahabubnagar and Vikarabad districts.
Officials, however, clarified that there was no impact on the reach of government programmes to these villages as a majority of them continued to be in clusters earmarked for the respective mandals.
