Afternoon Pulse: Record power demand, a court setback for Sushee Infra, and KTR opens a third front

Since this morning, Telangana's crisis has been measured more precisely and argued more loudly, but not yet answered. The power utilities have put official numbers on the record demand. The courts have moved on two cases the government cares about. And KT Rama Rao has added a new allegation to the two he made this week, while the government has still not replied to the most serious of them.

Start with the grid. Newsmeter and Siasat reported that the state hit an all-time peak of 20,003 MW at 10:29 am on Thursday. That is 1,455 MW above last year's highest figure of 18,548 MW, Newsmeter said. The state used 334.54 million units that day, and TGSPDCL, which serves Hyderabad and the south, supplied a record 228.14 million units. Hyderabad's own peak reached 4,220 MW on Thursday evening, against 3,552 MW last October. The utilities said they met the demand without disruption. TGSPDCL CMD Jitesh V Patil also asked consumers to use electricity judiciously. Behind the record is a balance to strike. The higher demand climbs, the more the state must buy on the market, and the more weight falls on the Chief Minister's appeal to skip rabi paddy.

At Yadadri, the five IAS officers are due to take turns at the plant until 30 October, and no findings have been reported yet. The suspension of the Stage 1 chief engineer remains the only disciplinary step we have seen. Nobody above plant level has been named.

The coal loop is still open. KTR's open letter alleged that a planned import of foreign coal could hide a Rs 3,000-crore scam. We found no direct reply to that charge from the government, Singareni or Union Coal Minister G Kishan Reddy. The closest answer came from minister D Sridhar Babu at a press conference on Thursday afternoon. Deccan Chronicle and Siasat reported that he rejected BRS claims of a coal shortage and missing coal at Singareni. He said the Yadadri shortfall came from a BRS-era agreement to supply 14 million tonnes a year of G-9 coal, a grade Singareni has averaged only about 4 million tonnes of. He blamed the previous government for skipping central coal block auctions and dared critics to produce evidence. Neither report mentions imports.

On Radial Road-2, the courts have moved but the politics has not. A High Court division bench led by Acting Chief Justice P Sam Koshy disposed of Sushee Infra's two writ appeals and sent the company back to the single judge, Newsmeter and The Hans India reported. The single judge had asked Sushee to implead the winning bidder before any order. Deccan Chronicle reported that the bench declined interim relief and said the tender should not be halted while the main petitions are pending. The single judge is due to hear them on 29 October. That is a setback for the firm linked to Congress MLA K Rajagopal Reddy's family. It does not touch the separate allegation by RVM Constructions MD Nama Ramesh that the Chief Minister sought a 15 per cent commission. In the reports we read, the Chief Minister's Office has still not responded to that claim.

KTR opened a third front on X. As reported by Telangana Today and ANI, he alleged that Hyderabad is becoming a hub for "fake" aerospace and defence shell companies and asked Defence Minister Rajnath Singh to look into them. He named Aindri Defence Advisory, which he said won a Rs 56.8-crore single-tender order from BDL, citing a national daily's report. He also named Tesseract Advanced Systems, which he linked to the Chief Minister's brother Anumula Kondal Reddy, and Raghava Aerospace, which he linked to minister Ponguleti Srinivasa Reddy's family. These are allegations. Neither report carried a response from the companies, the state government or the Defence Ministry.

One case went the government's way. On Thursday, the Supreme Court dismissed a challenge to the High Court order that had let the Kalyana Lakshmi and Shaadi Mubarak marriage-assistance schemes continue, Deccan Chronicle and Siasat reported. A bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justice Joymala Bagchi heard the case. The petitioner, advocate Vijay Gopal, had argued that the schemes run on executive orders without legislative backing. The court asked that a pending PIL on the schemes be heard by a High Court division bench, preferably one headed by the Chief Justice, so the legal question is not yet settled.

The two-day voter enrolment camps close today, and no figures on Form 6 applications have been released. We have still seen no report of what happened at Thursday's High Court hearing on the SIR petition, or of a listing date for Asaduddin Owaisi's petition in the Supreme Court. The all-party meeting on El Nino still has no new date.