KTR’s claim that the centre denied for flood relief fund under NDRF to Telangana is deceptive- Read the Fact check

Minister for Municipal Administration & Urban Development, Industries & Commerce, and Information Technology of Telangana, Kalvakuntla Taraka Rama Rao, aka KTR claim that not a single rupee was granted to Telangana under NDRF since 2018!

On 19^th July 2022, the son of Telangana’s chief minister, KTR tweeted, “Hon’ble @PMOIndia Is this what ‘Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas’ & Co-operative federalism means? Telangana has been reeling under heavy floods but not a single rupee granted under NDRF since 2018! Neither did you offer relief to the 2020 Hyderabad floods nor the 2022 Godavari floods. Why?”

Soon his tweet went viral with thousands of retweets and likes.

Fact Check

To verify the claim DFRAC team looks thoroughly at the government documents. According to a report of India Today in which was mentioned that, the claim by KTR is factually true as the table shared by KTR is the same as presented by MOS Home Affairs Nityanand Rai presented in the Lok Sabha on July 19 while responding to a question from Assam MP Prodyut Bordolui. And, according to the table Chhattisgarh, Goa, Haryana, Punjab, Mizoram, Jammu and Kashmir, Uttarakhand, and Telangana have not received any funds from ADRF since 2018!

Is it right for KTR to put the onus on centre?

According to an MHA report, since FY 2018-19, Telangana asked for funds under the NDRF only once. In FY 2020-21 Telangana asked for Rs. 698.87 crores and the committee approved Rs. 245.96 crores.

But as per the laid down procedure, it is expected that the state would not seek relief from the Centre if there are already sufficient balanced lying unused under its own State Disaster Response Funds. If there are already funds lying under the SDRF, the Centre will deduct 50 per cent of the unused SDRF fund (at the beginning of the financial year) from the approved amount.

For example, if the Centre approves Rs. 100 and the SDRF already has Rs. 50, then the Centre will deduct Rs. 25 and the state would be eligible only for Rs. 75.

However, there is one more condition to be met. If the SDRF already has more than double the amount for which it is eligible (after the above calculation), it will not get any funds at all. This is what happened in the case of Telangana in 2020-2021.

The amount finally approved by the Centre was Rs.245.96 crore. But on April 1, 2020, Telangana’s SDRF already had crores in its kitty. This was almost four times the approved amount. As a result, it did not get any funds from the Centre.

Conclusion

Telangana has not received any relief fund from NDRF since 2018. But, the targeting centre for it is misleading.