Dr Narasimha Reddy Donthi

The CURE Bill 2026 does not refer to the Telangana Legislature in matters of reporting, accountability, or procedural oversight. Apart from the Chief Minister, who stands as the sole elected representative linked to this new institutional framework, no other representative is integrated into its governance. Yet this structure is set to govern a population of nearly 1.3 crore people, marked by extraordinary socio-economic diversity. The CURE region itself contributes nearly 90 per cent of Telangana's GDP, underscoring its centrality to the state's economy. Despite this, on paper, the institution remains detached from the Legislature, while in practice its relationship with state authority is likely to be far more ambiguous. Current inequities in resource allocation, project formulation, and execution continue to plague Hyderabad. Large areas remain neglected while attention is disproportionately directed towards "shining examples" such as Kokapet. Instead of resolving these disparities, the consolidation of revenue and centralisation of decision-making risk perpetuating them. The Old City, erstwhile villages, peripheral municipalities, and poorer neighbourhoods struggle with outdated or non-existent water, sanitation, and road infrastructure. Flagship programmes like SRDP, SNDP, and H-CITI serve only select pockets, leaving vast regions underserved. Scarce financial resources are siphoned into corruption and poor maintenance, while loans are raised for unnecessary, unprioritised projects—adding a long-term burden to the public exchequer. Against this backdrop, can the CURE Apex Governance Council truly address Hyderabad's entrenched inequities and misdirected vision of growth? The CURE Bill 2026 offers no such assurance. Telangana's Core Urban Region (Integrated Governance) Bill, 2026, will decide how water bills are calculated, how building permits are granted, how tax is assessed, and who picks up the phone when a drain overflows—for the nearly 1.3 crore people living across Hyderabad's core urban districts. It is, by any measure, one of the most consequential pieces of local-governance legislation the state has produced in decades. So, it is worth asking a basic question before it becomes law: when this new system actually has to decide something, who is in the room and who answers to voters? Trace the Bill's own architecture, and the answer is uncomfortable. At the top sits a CURE Apex Governance Council, chaired by the Chief Minister, staffed by a minister, a Principal Secretary as convenor, and whichever other officials the Chairperson chooses to invite. Beneath it, a CURE Executive Committee is stocked entirely with Commissioners, Police Commissioners, and Collectors. Nowhere in either body does a mayor, a corporator, an MLA, or an MP appear. The Bill gives this appointed Council the power to set "the overall agenda, vision, policy direction and strategic priorities" for the entire region while the elected Corporations, whose voters actually live with the consequences, operate underneath frameworks this Council approves. It gets thinner the further down you look. Article 243S of the Constitution requires Ward Committees in municipalities of this size, precisely so that residents have a standing, institutional voice below the level of the Corporation itself. This Bill does provide for them as paragraphs three and four of a Schedule titled "Elections", sandwiched between rules on dividing wards for polling and the constitution of the State Election Commission. Their actual job, once you find them, is sanitation, tree planting, and helping the Corporation collect its own taxes. Nothing about ward-level budgets. Nothing that obliges the Corporation to act, or even respond, when a Ward Committee raises an issue. And they need only meet once a quarter, the same minimal frequency set for the Executive Committee of state officials above them. At the same time, the Apex Council above everyone has no mandated meeting frequency at all. Beneath even the ward lies a governance space this Bill barely acknowledges: the modern high-rise residential complex. Some of these now house up to 3,000 families, populations larger than those of many statutory towns, with their own roads, water systems, security, and internal disputes to manage. All of that currently runs through Resident Welfare Associations registered as private societies, answerable to no municipal law, no financial audit, no public grievance mechanism. This Bill's entire engagement with that reality is a short section asking these associations to help with garbage segregation and take the Commissioner's calls about cleanliness. A rapidly growing share of how people actually experience urban governance in this region sits entirely outside the Bill's imagination of what governance is. And then there is the sheer weight of one word. "Government" appears in this Bill roughly 474 times. Strip out the incidental mentions, and what remains—"Government may", "Government shall", "vest exclusively in the Government"—still recurs some 253 times. Every new institution this Bill creates, from a Smart Governance Centre with compulsory data-access powers over every Corporation, to a Climate Action Cell setting emissions policy, to a traffic authority layered atop the one that already exists, is established by Government notification, with composition and powers left to the Government to determine. Boundary changes, tariff increases, and fee exemptions are all Government discretion, none of them requiring so much as a Corporation's recorded objection first. Defenders of the Bill will say metropolitan regions need a strong coordinating hand, and there is something to that: a region spanning several municipal Corporations does need mechanisms bigger than any one Corporation to plan water, transport, and disaster response together. But coordination and centralisation are not the same thing, and this Bill consistently chooses the second while calling it the first. A functioning check on all this concentrated discretion would be the Apex Council itself, meeting regularly, weighing competing interests, answerable in some fashion to the people it governs. Instead, the one body positioned to check the Government's exercise of power has no requirement to convene at all, which leaves, in practice, whichever official actually controls the machinery of government from day to day holding the leverage a functioning institution was meant to hold. None of this requires assuming bad faith. It is entirely possible to conclude, reading this Bill provision by provision, that its drafters were solving a real coordination problem and simply reached, by habit, for the tools of centralisation rather than the harder work of building accountable, functioning shared institutions. But the effect on the page is what matters to the people who will live under this law: a document that talks about integrated governance while quietly removing almost every point at which an elected voice, or an ordinary resident, could actually be heard. A Bill this consequential deserves better than that, and there is still time, before it becomes law, to ask it to answer to the people it governs.

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