After his swearing-in ceremony on May 20, Rajasekhara Reddy (YS) inducted 35 ministers into his cabinet on the evening of May 22 at the Raj Bhavan. Governor N D Tiwary adminis-tered the oath of office to him at the swearing-in ceremony.

Surprisingly, YS also dropped from the cabinet his close associate Kasu Venkata Krishna Reddy of Guntur district, besides R Damodar Reddy from Nalgonda district. However, Da-modar Reddy’s brother, Venkata Reddy from Khammam district was inducted into the cabi-net. With almost all ministers from Telangana having lost in the recent elections, Reddy picked as many as five women from the region for the cabinet. The only other woman minis-ter, Galla Arunakumari, hails from Rayalaseema, while the coastal region is represented only by men.

Barring Adilabad, where the Congress performed badly, all the other districts found represen-tation in the ministry which has 20 new faces. Guntur district has been given the highest rep-resentation with five ministers; besides, the deputy speaker’s post has been allocated to Tenali MLA, Nadendla Manohar. He is the son of former Chief Minister Nadendla Bhaskara Rao. Other ministers from this district are K Rosaiah, Kanna Lakshminarayana, Gade Venkata Reddy, M V Ramana Rao and D Manikya Vara Prasad.

Having brought the party to power for a second time, the Chief Minister appears to have had an easy time in getting the high command’s nod for the team of his choice, unlike the pulls and pressures that are typical of government formation in the Congress regime.

Caste-wise, Reddys and BCs got the lion’s share with 11 ministers from each community. There are four SCs, one ST, two Yadavs and one each from Brahmin, Kamma, Vysya, Ve-lama, Khastriya, Goud, Munnur Kapu, Toorpu Kapu and Balija communities. The Legislative Council has a lone representative in the Cabinet in Konijeti Rosaiah, finance minister in the last cabinet, who did not contest the election this time.

The fresh faces in the Cabinet are: Sridhar Babu (Karimnagar), Sudarshan Reddy (Nizama-bad), Konda Surekha (Warangal), R Venkata Reddy (Khammam), Sunitha Lakshma Reddy (Medak), K Venkata Reddy (Nalgonda), J Krishna Rao, DK Aruna (both from Mahaboobna-gar), Danam Nagender (Hyderabad), Silpa Mohan Reddy (Kurnool), Ahmadulla I(Kadapa) P Ramachandra Reddy (Chittoor), B Srinivasa Reddy (Prakasam), Manikya Varaprasad and Gade Venkata Reddy (Guntur), Parthasarathy (Krishna), Vatti Vasantha Kumar and P Sat-yanarayana (West Godavari) Viswaroop (East Godavari) and P Balaraju (Vizag).

The retained ministers are: P Lakshmaiah (Warangal) , D Rajanarasimha (Medak), Sabita In-dra Reddy (Ranga Reddy), Mukesh Goud (Hyderabad), N Raghuveera Reddy (Anantapur), G Arunakumari (Chittoor) , Anam Ramnarayana Reddy (Nellore), K Rosaiah (Prakasam), K Lakshminarayana, Mopidevi Venkataramana (Guntur), P Subhash Chandra Bose (East Goda-vari), B Satyanarayana (Vizianagaram) and D Prasada Rao and Satrucharla Vijayarama Raju (Srikakulam).