Seven children have died in a fire at the RIMS hospital in Adilabad, and BRS working president K.T. Rama Rao, better known as KTR, is accusing the Revanth Reddy government of hiding behind a rat explanation for a tragedy that should never have happened.

KTR made the remarks at a Rythu Garjana farmers’ rally held at the DIET ground in Adilabad on Sunday evening. He did not hold back. He said 24 children were caught in the blaze, seven of them died, and the rest were seriously injured. Those are the numbers he put on the record, and they are the ones that matter most in this story.

According to KTR, the government’s answer to the question of why the children died is simple. Rats. He mocked that explanation directly from the stage, saying that when people ask why the children died, they are told it was rats, and that seven children were killed by rats.

The cat jibe

KTR then turned his fire on the Chief Minister personally. Reading the state’s leadership as a cat that cannot catch mice, he asked whether the man running Telangana could not even manage to catch rats. He wanted to know if the government was incapable of dealing with rodents, and then asked the question that drew the loudest reaction from his supporters: why is the CM still in the chair?

The sarcasm was deliberate. The point he was making is that a government that cannot keep rats out of a hospital ward, or that cannot explain how a fire starts in a place where children are supposed to be safe, has lost the basic authority to govern. Whether the rats were the immediate cause or not, KTR’s argument is that the state failed the children long before the flames took hold.

Who will bring back those golden lives, Chief Minister? Does your government have any shame? Does it have even basic decency?

That line is the emotional core of KTR’s attack. He called the children golden lives and asked the CM who could possibly return them. Then he asked the question that political opponents in Telangana have been circling for months: does this government still have the shame to feel what it has done?

Compensation demand and the families

KTR said BRS leaders had pressed the government to deliver justice for the affected families. He named Jogu Ramanna, Kova Lakshmi, Anil Jadhav and Satyavathi Rathod as among those who have demanded compensation on behalf of the families. The demand is specific: Rs 25 lakh for each family.

The gap between that demand and the government’s response is where KTR placed his sharpest criticism. He said the government had not even made a sound on the request. No response, no movement, no clear word on the payments. For families who have just buried children, that silence is its own kind of injury.

KTR also said his party was trying to help the families directly, with some financial assistance from BRS funds while the government has yet to act. It is a move that exposes the state’s failure in the most literal way: an opposition party is stepping in to do what the state has not.

Why this lands hard in Telangana

This is not a distant tragedy for the state. Adilabad is a Telangana district, and the RIMS hospital is a government health facility that the state is responsible for running, staffing and protecting. When a fire inside a public hospital kills children, the question moves beyond one building. It becomes a question about how the state maintains the institutions that ordinary families depend on when they have nowhere else to go.

For people in Telangana who rely on government hospitals, the issue is immediate. Parents who bring children into public hospitals expect that the wards will be safe from fire and from the kind of basic failures that KTR is now attacking. Every claim that the government is handling the aftermath with a rat explanation feeds the suspicion that its health infrastructure is not being looked after with the seriousness it deserves.

What the government has not answered

The public record so far, as reported from KTR’s speech, leaves several things unclear. The government’s rat explanation has been relayed by KTR as the official line, but the details of how the fire started and what safety systems were in place are not spelled out in the reports available. Nor is there a clear account of the treatment being given to the injured children, or of when the government plans to respond to the compensation demand.

Those gaps are the reason the story is still building. A fire that kills seven children in a government hospital is not a one-day story. It is a test of whether the state can give families straight answers and whether it can move quickly on compensation when children are the victims.

KTR made clear his position. He is not asking for a speech. He is asking for money for the families, accountability for the hospital, and an answer to a question that cannot be answered with a joke about mice. The rally crowd heard that message, and so will the families in Adilabad, who are now left with the question of who will bring their children back.