Held for a generation. Poor for a generation.

Each cell shows the leading party’s vote share in that seat and year.

The two exceptions are both Malakpet, in cycles AIMIM sat out. Since 2014 the party’s share has fallen in four of the five seats — furthest in Yakutpura, where 2023 was nearly a tie with MBT (32.9% to 32.2%) on the district’s lowest turnout. AIMIM still holds every seat, with smaller margins than a decade ago.

Two ways of seeing the same gap: a rich ward and a poor ward side by side, and then the single ward that carries the whole pattern.

The old city is not uniform. Ward 73 in Asifnagar banks like Jubilee Hills, and the district’s worst-served ward on water and drainage is ward 1 in Musheerabad, outside the old city. The pattern holds across 52 wards, not because every ward fits it.

The census last counted these things ward by ward in 2011, and nothing has counted them since — the 2021 census was never held. The default view below carries each line as far forward as the evidence goes: cooking gas to NFHS-5’s measured 2019–21 coverage, banking to a stated post–Jan Dhan assumption, services held at their already-full levels, and every line with no newer measurement labelled “2011 — latest” rather than quietly presented as current. The switch shows the raw 2011 census instead. Nothing supports a 2026 number for any of them.

Start with what the data actually shows. Only about a third of old-city residents have work of any kind — 37%, against 44% in the rest of the district. Among women it is 18% against 25%. This is the biggest and most reliable difference in all the data, and it is not because the old city has more children — the gap is the same when you count only adults. People who earn less own less, and that is the rest of the pattern: less cooking gas, less banking, less internet, fewer vehicles. Reading and writing are only a few points behind, so basic schooling is not the wall.

Why do fewer people work? Ward data cannot separate the causes, but it can name the candidates: schooling that stops early even where basic literacy is close; few formal jobs within reach of these neighbourhoods; weak access to credit for the self-employed; discrimination in hiring; and norms that keep much of women’s work unpaid and at home. Which of these binds, and how hard, is the open question — and the one worth putting to anyone who represents these seats. What the same data rules out is below.

“The old city was denied services”

The Census refutes this directly. Treated tap water 97.1% against 97.4%, closed drainage 98.4% against 97.5%, bathrooms 98.9% against 99.0% — no difference significant, drainage slightly favouring the old city. And the finding cannot have decayed since 2011: both halves were already at 94–99%, coverage that high has nowhere to fall, and NFHS-5 puts the whole district at 99.6% improved water and 99.9% electricity by 2019–21.

“It’s the slums”

The share of people in GHMC-listed slums is statistically the same inside the old city as outside it — medians 20.5% against 19.7%, p = 0.61. The city’s slum concentrations sit along the Musi and in the north-west. Old-city poverty lives in ordinary, legal, serviced housing, which is precisely what makes it harder to explain away.

“Things must have improved since 2011”

Two gaps did close. NFHS-5 records 99.5% of district households on clean cooking fuel by 2019–21, so the 21-point gas gap is gone; with 84% of Telangana’s women holding their own bank account after Jan Dhan, the banking gap has almost certainly gone too. Both were closed by national schemes that reached every ward in India at once, so they are not evidence of local development — and the 2011 shortfalls were not evidence of local neglect. The gaps with no scheme behind them — work, internet, vehicles — have not been measured at ward level since, and there is no reason to assume they closed.

The box below is the strongest causal test we could run, and what it found. Then two lists: what the data shows, and what it does not.

So the claim that survives every check in this repository is this one:

One party has represented the old city for a generation. Its people still work less and earn less than the rest of their district, in legal, fully serviced neighbourhoods — and the only gaps that closed were closed by national schemes.

The 2008 boundary redraw remains the one untried design, blocked on a ward crosswalk that is not public; it is set out in the full analysis with the officeholder record and its sources, and leads the roadmap.

Five public datasets sit behind this site, all downloadable below. This page says how current each one is, what to be careful of when quoting it, and gives the full election table.