Sarpanchs in Saidapur mandal sat on the floor of the MPDO office in Karimnagar district on Tuesday, refusing to get up while a mandal general body meeting was in session. Their target was the way beneficiaries were chosen for Indiramma houses, and they said the process cut them out entirely.

The meeting was held at the MPDO office in Saidapur mandal centre on Tuesday, November 3, 2026. According to the report, the sarpanchs sat down on the floor to register their objection. They said the selection of Indiramma house beneficiaries was carried out without any involvement from sarpanchs, who are the elected heads of village panchayats.

Six sarpanchs spoke out against the process: Tonta Rajinikanth, Machamalla Srikanth, Medaveni Gopal, Chada Akhila, Ravinder Rao and Molugoori Chiranjeevi. Their grievance was twofold. They said the selection was made without their participation, and they accused officials of choosing people who were not eligible while passing over those who were.

The protest did not end when the meeting did. The report says the sarpanchs continued their sit-in inside the meeting hall after the general body session had concluded. That detail matters. It turned a routine administrative gathering into a visible confrontation, with elected local representatives remaining seated on the floor rather than leaving the room.

The sarpanchs said beneficiaries for Indiramma houses were selected without their involvement, and that ineligible people were chosen instead of those who qualify.

Why the sarpanchs say this is a problem

Sarpanchs sit at the village level, where residents bring housing, welfare and local grievances first. When they say they were left out of a selection process in their own panchayats, they are saying the people closest to the community were not consulted on who gets a home. That is the core of their complaint, and it is why the protest carried weight in the room.

The sarpanchs also made a claim about fairness. In their account, the people picked were not the people who should have been picked. That is a serious accusation, and the report presents it as the sarpanchs’ own view. It does not include a response from the officials named in the allegation, so the claim stands as the sarpanchs’ position at this stage.

A Telangana story with a local edge

Saidapur is a mandal in Karimnagar district, in Telangana. The dispute sits inside a state-level housing scheme, and it hits the most local layer of that system. Sarpanchs are the ones who face villagers when a house is granted or denied. If the sarpanchs say they were shut out of selection, the anger does not stay in a government office. It goes straight back to the village square, where the sarpanchs have to explain outcomes they say they had no part in shaping.

That is why this story is not just a meeting dispute. Housing under Indiramma is supposed to reach the people who qualify. When the claim is that it did not, the gap between the scheme on paper and the process on the ground becomes the story.

What the report does not say

The available account is clear on the protest, the people involved and the core allegation. It does not spell out how many houses are in dispute, which specific beneficiaries are being challenged, or what criteria were applied in selection. It also does not record any official statement from the MPDO office or any other authority responding to the sarpanchs’ claims. Readers should treat the accusation of ineligible selection as the sarpanchs’ allegation until those details are established.

The sit-in as a message

Sitting on the floor is a choice. It is not an accident of a crowded room. Elected sarpanchs chose to stay seated in the meeting hall even after the formal business had ended. In a local government setting, where chairs and tables define who holds authority, that act signals that they felt sidelined and wanted the protest seen by everyone still in the building.

The protest also raises a practical question: what mechanism do sarpanchs have when they believe housing selections are flawed? The report does not describe any prior complaint or formal appeal, so it is not possible to say what steps were taken before Tuesday. What is clear is that the sarpanchs decided the meeting was the place to make their objection heard.

For the families waiting on Indiramma houses, the stakes are direct. A house is not an abstract benefit. If the sarpanchs are right that eligible people were passed over, then the people who needed help most may still be waiting. If officials have a different account, that account needs to come out in the same public space where the sarpanchs made theirs.

The dispute in Saidapur is now a test of whether local representatives have a real voice in housing decisions made in their own mandal. The sarpanchs have put that question on record, and the next move belongs to the officials they named.