Part of Hyderabad’s old city, 1999–2023 · source file: ROADMAP.md
This site has taken the question — a generation of AIMIM wins, a generation of old-city poverty, does one explain the other? — as far as public data currently allows. The record is established, the poverty is measured at ward level, the easy explanations are eliminated, and the one formal causal test that could be run came back uninformative. What follows is the work that would move the argument further, in rough order of how much each item would add, and what each one is waiting on.
If you can supply any of the missing pieces, open an issue or a pull request on GitHub.
The 2008 boundary redraw moved wards between assembly constituencies without anyone in those wards changing how they voted. Wards that moved into or out of AIMIM-held seats, compared before and after on the 2001 and 2011 censuses, would be the cleanest test of representation effects available for this question — far stronger than the national close-contest design, which had only three usable bare wins.
Blocked on: a ward-boundary crosswalk between the 2001 and 2011 census wards for Hyderabad. None is public. The pieces that would unblock it are the 2001 municipal ward maps (on paper in MCH/GHMC records) and the delimitation notification assigning localities to the new constituencies. Digitising the two and matching them is a bounded project — GIS skills and a focused week — and it would be a genuine contribution to the literature, not just to this site. The design is set out in the full analysis.
The close-contest test used TCPD election results through 2022 and VIIRS night lights through 2021. The 2023 Telangana and 2024 Maharashtra elections both had AIMIM contesting widely and would add contests — possibly new near-ties, which is what the design is starved of.
Waiting on: the next TCPD/SHRUG data release. Nothing to do until it ships;
worth checking the Harvard Dataverse a couple of times a year. The same release
would fill the blank 2023 ELECTORS and VALID_VOTES cells in the election
file.
MP and MLA funds are small — roughly ₹250 a head over a full term. The money that builds a neighbourhood is the GHMC ward budget, and ward-wise capital works and spending are not published anywhere. A decade of ward-wise works data would answer a question nothing public can touch: are old-city wards underfunded per head, or funded and still poor?
Needs: an RTI to GHMC (works and town-planning wings) from an applicant in Telangana, asking for ward-wise capital expenditure, ideally 2016 onwards.
The MPLADS portal publishes MP-wise detail only from 2023–24; before that, the public record is aggregate. MP-wise utilisation for earlier terms exists in annexures to Lok Sabha questions. Assembling those would turn the funds section from a handful of press-reported figures into a proper by-party series.
Needs: patience with the Lok Sabha question archive, or an RTI to the Ministry of Statistics, which administers the scheme.
The GHMC slum list used for the ward-level slum shares carries no survey year; this site calls it "early 2010s" and treats it as a single time point. A records request to GHMC's Urban Community Development wing would pin the year down and say whether a newer round exists.
The updated ward estimates rest on NFHS-5 (2019–21) plus one stated assumption about banking. NFHS-6, whenever fieldwork happens, would add measured anchors for more indicators. And the next census — expected around 2027 — will replace the 2011 ward base entirely; when its ward tables publish, every level on this site can be re-estimated rather than projected.
Closed since launch (August 2026): the missing Bahadurpura 2009 row, recovered in full from the TCPD candidates file, and turnout, electorate and valid-vote columns for 1999–2023 — details in the data notes.