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The Andhra Pradesh cabinet met in Amaravati on Wednesday 7 October 2026 and cleared a package of decisions ranging from house sites to student welfare to health care, according to a Deccan Chronicle report published on 8 October. Housing Minister Kolusu Parthasarathy briefed the media on the decisions.
The most politically significant decision was the formation of a three-member ministerial committee to resolve house-site issues within 45 days. The panel includes the housing minister, the revenue minister and one more minister. It will examine vacant plots in existing layouts and registered plots that beneficiaries abandoned, explore cancelling such registrations and reallocating the sites to eligible families, and look at how to acquire land for roughly two lakh people who were identified as needing house sites in the recent Awas survey.
In education, the cabinet ratified orders for implementing the Thalliki Vandanam scheme for 2026–27. It approved the inclusion of 58,601 additional eligible students and financial assistance to 3,29,201 beneficiaries selected in the second phase. Student hostel diet charges were also increased by 10 percent with effect from 1 October, and the cabinet cleared coaching for IIT-JEE and NEET for 600 intermediate students at a tribal welfare school. It also removed procedural requirements for the registration of private schools.
On health, the cabinet approved gratuity as an end-of-service benefit for eligible ASHA workers who die in service, at Rs 5,000 for every completed year of service, subject to a maximum of Rs 1.5 lakh. It upgraded the community health centre at Repalle from 30 to 100 beds. These are modest-looking items, but the ASHA decision adds a form of death benefit for a workforce that is paid mainly through honoraria and incentives.
For farmers, the cabinet approved the creation and implementation of a Horticulture Information and Management System to consolidate, manage and analyse horticulture data and improve services to growers. The work will be given to Vassar Labs IT Solutions Pvt Ltd. The reports do not give the cost of the system or the timeline for its rollout, so those details are not yet public.
A few numbers help put the decisions in proportion. The 58,601 additional students are about 18 percent of the 3,29,201 beneficiaries selected in the second phase, by IndiaX24’s arithmetic. The ASHA gratuity of Rs 5,000 per completed year reaches its Rs 1.5 lakh ceiling after 30 years of service, so most families would receive far less. The 45-day deadline for the house-site panel counts from the cabinet meeting of 7 October, which puts it in the third week of November.
Delivery will be the test. The house-site panel has a 45-day deadline, which runs to late November, and its work depends on land being available and on beneficiary lists being verified. The Thalliki Vandanam additions affect families in the second phase of the scheme, and the numbers show a large pool of beneficiaries. The state has also been pushing capital works in Amaravati, where the same cabinet met. IndiaX24 will report on the panel’s recommendations and on how the new benefits are rolled out.
Featured image: The MLA and MLC quarters in Amaravati (file photo, March 2019). Photo by IM3847, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.