The Government of Telangana has been exploring the possibility of expanding the purview of the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) by merging together peripheral corporations and municipalities. All the seven municipal corporations and 30 municipalities which fall under the Hyderabad Metropolitan Development Authority (HMDA) are to be unified with the GHMC to form one urban civic body, along the lines of the merger of three corporations into the Municipal Corporation of Delhi two years ago.
Chief Minister A. Revanth Reddy is said to have issued instructions to Municipal Administration and Urban Development officials to study the feasibility of the proposal and come up with a report. It is proposed that the existing divisions also be re-organised because a few have a population of more than 1,00,000 while a few others have a population of only 30,000.
If this detailed project becomes a reality, Telangana will probably have the biggest civic body in India. The government is said to have decided to centralise urban local governance because of the unequal distribution of funds and the patchy development among urban local bodies (ULBs) around the State capital.
