The Congress government in Telangana headed by chief minister A Revanth Reddy has unearthed what it calls one of the biggest administrative scams — an alleged misuse of nearly Rs 18,000 crore of public funds during the previous Bharat Rashtra Samithi government headed by K Chandrashekar Rao.
The irregularities, detected during the ongoing verification of government employees under the new Integrated Finance Management and Information System (IFMIS), have revealed a massive network of ghost employees, fake outsourcing contracts, and fictitious wage payments spread across government departments, corporations, universities, and local bodies.
The KCR government had once declared that Telangana would eliminate all forms of contract and outsourcing employment, promising regularization and transparency. However, the latest audit findings suggest otherwise.
According to official records, 4,93,820 employees were listed as contract or outsourcing staff — a figure that belies KCR’s earlier assertion that such employment no longer existed.
After Revanth Reddy ordered a department-wide data collection exercise requiring Aadhaar, PF, and ESI details, only 2,74,844 employees were verified by the October 16 deadline.
The remaining 2.18 lakh “employees” could not be traced — prompting suspicions that a significant portion were bogus beneficiaries who continued to draw salaries for years without actually working.
Preliminary assessments indicate that at least one lakh ghost employees may have received illegal payments over the last decade, amounting to Rs 18,000 crore in misappropriated public funds.
Senior officials revealed that even IAS and IPS officers, heads of departments, and politically connected individuals had included the names of relatives and fake staff on payrolls.
The scale of the fraud is illustrated by cases like the GHMC, which reported 21,000 outsourcing staff. After the introduction of a facial recognition attendance system, the real number dropped to around 15,000, exposing about 6,000 ghost employees.
Similarly, in the General Administration Department (GAD), 1,600 temporary employees were listed, but only 764 were found to be working.
With the data verification drive still underway, sources in the government suggest that this is only the tip of the iceberg.
The Revanth Reddy administration is expected to order criminal investigations and financial recovery proceedings against those involved in what officials are calling “a decade-long administrative fraud.”