Take a hard look at the map. No speeches, no politics—just colours. Yellow means a citizen can reach the district headquarters in thirty minutes or less. Green stretches it to forty-five. Blue sentences entire mandals to an hour or more, often on roads that dissolve in the first monsoon shower. This was the Andhra Pradesh we inherited in June 2024: twenty-six districts drawn in 2022 with a ruler that never touched the ground. The deepest blues clustered exactly where people suffered most—western Prakasam, upland Annamayya, the Godavari agency tracts, and the orphaned mandals of Mandapeta. Blue meant a farmer in Yerragondapalem lost a full day and six hundred rupees to reach Ongole for a certificate Markapur could have issued in twenty minutes. Blue meant tribal families in Maredumilli treated the collector’s office like a pilgrimage undertaken once a year.
On 25 November 2025, N. Chandrababu Naidu’s cabinet began erasing those scars. Three new districts—Markapuram, Madanapalle, and Polavaram with Rampachodavaram as headquarters—plus five new revenue divisions are not being created for prettier name-boards. They are being created because someone finally opened this map and declared blue unacceptable. Markapuram wipes the darkest stain off western Prakasam. Madanapalle pulls the scattered fragments of old Annamayya into a tight yellow-green circle. Polavaram gives 3.49 lakh tribal citizens a headquarters they can actually see from their hilltops instead of one existing only on paper three districts away.
Mandapeta tells the story in miniature. Three mandals painted royal blue in 2022 because a line was drawn without ever travelling the road. The moment they were brought home to East Godavari, the entire patch flipped to bright yellow—eight kilometres to Rajamahendravaram on some days, never more than thirty-five. That single correction is what “reorg” actually means on the ground: a morning bus out, an evening bus back, and a life no longer hostage to distance.
Critics will count new collector bungalows and staff cars. Let them. The real expenditure for the last three years has been borne by the citizen—lost wages, children missing school to accompany parents, files rotting because the officer was simply too far away. That hidden tax runs into hundreds of crores every year. The new districts are the state deciding to stop collecting it. This is not rocket science; it is the simplest promise of democratic governance: the office that serves you must be within reach of an ordinary day. Everything else—population norms, revenue thresholds, parliamentary constituencies—can be adjusted later. First, kill the blue.
When the next version of this map is drawn, probably in 2026 after the new districts settle, Andhra Pradesh should be almost entirely yellow with a few streaks of green. If even one stubborn patch of blue remains, the job will be incomplete. That is the only report card the people of Markapuram, Rampachodavaram, and Madanapalle will accept. And that is the only report card this government has promised to deliver.
