Five panchayats sit 40 km from a Telangana desk and 282 km from an Andhra one. He took that map to Shah.

Five gram panchayats near Bhadrachalam still sit on an Andhra ledger. Their nearest Telangana district desk is about 40 kilometres away. The Andhra district headquarters that holds them is about 282 kilometres away. On Thursday Telangana’s Agriculture Minister took that arithmetic to the Union Home Minister.

Tummala Nageswara Rao was at the 31st Southern Zonal Council in Mahabalipuram, also called Mamallapuram, on 20 August 2026. Amit Shah chaired the meeting. Tummala made representations to Shah and to Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu. Telangana Deputy Chief Minister Mallu Bhatti Vikramarka was also in the room. This cutting is not the already-reported water sitting of that council. This is the five-panchayat file, and the rupee file that travelled with it.

The villages he named are Yatapaka, Kannayigudem, Pitchukalapadu, Purushothapatnam and Gundala. Five gram panchayats. Nineteen revenue villages. The ask is to merge them into Bhadradri Kothagudem in Telangana. Bhadrachalam is the town the file keeps pointing at. A citizen who needs a revenue desk, a police desk, a hospital paper, should not, in Tummala’s telling, travel 282 kilometres into Andhra when a Telangana headquarters is 40 kilometres from the same door.

Distance is not poetry. It is a bus fare and a lost workday. A panchayat that is “near Bhadrachalam” and still administered from a far Andhra headquarters is a map that survived bifurcation as an inconvenience. Thursday’s representation asks the Union Home Minister, who chairs the zonal council, and the Andhra Chief Minister, who would have to let the villages go, to treat that inconvenience as a boundary that can still be redrawn.

He did not bring only a map. He brought a canal bill. Peddavagu irrigation, damaged in the July 2024 rains, needs restoration at ₹92.20 crore. Tummala’s position is that Andhra Pradesh should release its share. A canal that crosses a state line after a monsoon does not care which secretariat writes the cheque. The figure is ₹92.20 crore. That is a restoration estimate, not a slogan. A share that is not released is a canal that stays broken.

He brought a price as well. Oil palm fresh fruit bunches, he said, should have a minimum support price of ₹25,000 a tonne. Godavari-bank farmers who put land under oil palm are looking at a floor, not a speech. ₹25,000 a tonne is the number he put on the council table. Without a notified floor that both states and the Centre will honour, a support price is only a minister’s sentence.

The fourth paper was a road. Bhadrachalam to Eluru, via Chintalapudi and Dhammapeta, should be a national highway. That alignment is a Telangana town, two named intermediate places, and an Andhra city. A national highway tag is a Union decision. Putting it in a zonal council representation is how a state asks the Home Minister, in a room where the Andhra Chief Minister is also sitting, to treat a border road as a national road.

Four asks, one morning, one minister: merge five panchayats and nineteen revenue villages into Bhadradri Kothagudem; make Andhra pay its share of ₹92.20 crore for Peddavagu; put oil palm FFB at ₹25,000 a tonne; notify the Bhadrachalam–Eluru road as NH. Shah heard the representations. Naidu heard them. Bhatti Vikramarka was present. The facts this desk holds do not include an answer from either man on these four points. This desk will not invent a nod.

A zonal council cannot, by itself, move a village from one state gazette to another. It can put the Home Minister and two state governments in the same minute. Thursday was that minute for Yatapaka and its four neighbours. Until a gazette follows the 40-kilometre argument, the five panchayats remain where the old map left them — close to Bhadrachalam, far from the Andhra headquarters that still signs their papers, and on a canal whose ₹92.20 crore restoration is still a share waiting to be paid.