Hyderabad: Amid the ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, the Telangana government has created a statewide electronic Telangana Family Register and started issuing a Family Register Certificate (FRC) through the MeeSeva platform.
The Revenue Department notified the move through government order (GO) 172, dated July 25, 2026. The government said the certificate is meant to make it easier for people to access citizen services, bring uniformity in the way family details are verified and give every family a ready, authenticated record it can fall back on.
The order said the decision follows the difficulties citizens routinely face in producing a reliable record of who is in their family while applying for various government services.
The FRC is a single document that lists the details of an entire family. For each family unit, it carries a Family Register Identification Number, which is the same as the family’s ration card number, along with the name of the head of the family and every member, each member’s relationship to the head, age, date of birth, gender, Aadhaar number and the family’s present address.
The register is built on the Food Security Card (ration card) database maintained by the Civil Supplies Department. The tehsildar of the mandal in which the family’s address appears in that database is the authority who issues the certificate.
The Family Register is one of the 12 documents the Election Commission of India (ECI) accepts during the SIR. This makes it particularly useful for voters who have to prove their date of birth when their entries come up for scrutiny.
The document requirement in the SIR depends on when a voter was born.
For instance, those born before July 1, 1987, need to produce any one of the listed documents establishing their own date or place of birth. Those born between July 1, 1987, and December 2, 2004, must submit a document for themselves and one for either parent. Those born after December 2, 2004, need documents for themselves and both parents.
Because the FRC carries the dates of birth and Aadhaar numbers of every family member in one place, it can serve these requirements together, which is why it is being seen as a convenient fallback, especially for the poor and those without other paperwork.
The application is meant to be simple. Any adult member of the family whose details are in the register can apply and the only detail required is the family’s ration card number. No supporting documents are needed.
Citizens can apply at any MeeSeva centre or through the MeeSeva online portal or mobile app, on payment of the service charge, which is Rs 62. The order fixes a delivery timeline of two working days and directs tehsildars to dispose of applications within that period.
The government has been careful to spell out the limits of the document. The FRC is only a record of a family’s composition. It does not confer any right, title or interest in property, cannot be treated as proof of legal heirship and does not by itself make anyone eligible for government welfare schemes.
All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) president and Hyderabad MP Asaduddin Owaisi welcomed the move, thanking the government for what he called a “timely decision.”
He said the certificate was one of the 12 documents accepted under the SIR and would benefit many poor and undocumented people if they received notices, adding that he had made a representation for it along with Faheem Qureshi, Vice Chairman and President of the Telangana Minorities Residential Educational Institutions Society (TMREIS).
Government Advisor on Minority Affairs Mohammed Ali Shabbir also backed the decision. He had earlier proposed to Chief Minister Revanth Reddy that Telangana bring in a certificate on the lines of Karnataka’s Permanent Residence Certificate.
The state Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) took the opposite view. Its president, N Ramchander Rao, alleged that the Congress government was rushing to issue the certificates to protect an “illegal vote bank.”
Accusing the Congress, Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) and AIMIM of having sheltered such vote banks “for decades,” he claimed they saw a “political death warrant” in the SIR scrutiny and called the FRC “completely illegal.”
This post was last modified on July 28, 2026 11:13 am