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Telugu Desam Party (TDP) spokesperson N Vijay Kumar at a press meet held at the party office in Amaravati on Monday, July 24 claimed that the Field Operations Agency (FOA) that liaised between the Andhra Pradesh government and the state’s village and ward volunteers is managed by I-PAC (Indian Political Action Committee), a political consultancy firm working for the ruling YSR Congress Party (YSRCP).
Vijay Kumar flayed the government for not responding to the allegations from the opposition on the issue. “We were able to obtain various facts relating to the FOA. It was given the task of data portal management and monitoring of volunteers. The FOA is actually operated by I-PAC. Both the FOA and I-PAC employ the same volunteers,” he claimed.
Earlier, Jana Sena Party (JSP) chief Pawan Kalyan had also claimed that the FOA, which is based in Hyderabad’s Nanakramguda, held all the personal information obtained from the state’s residents and made serious allegations of data theft by the state government appointed volunteers.
Incidentally, the previous TDP regime too had introduced Janmabhoomi committees in 2014, which are often compared with the YSRCP government’s volunteer system. While the committees were expected to improve access to welfare schemes and were also tasked with identifying beneficiaries, the YSRCP had alleged widespread corruption and discrimination along party lines, alleging that the committee members favoured TDP supporters and demanded bribes from others.
The TDP was also accused of data theft in 2019, when IT Grids, a firm which created the TDP’s official Seva Mitra app, was booked for voter data theft ahead of the Assembly and Lok Sabha elections that year. The firm was accused of stealing data from the government database related to Aadhaar, electoral rolls, and beneficiaries of government programmes in order to help the TDP’s election outcomes.
