Andhra's fuel crisis is the kind of governance failure where every actor in the system is technically not at fault.

Andhra's fuel crisis is the kind of governance failure where every actor in the system is technically not at fault. Oil companies say crude prices made retailing diesel unprofitable. Dealers say they have no stock. The State Government, which doesn't actually control crude or refinery dispatch, has nonetheless ordered 'priority diesel supply for agriculture' via a notification that doesn't bind any of the three state-owned oil companies it is technically meant to direct. Diesel demand jumped 50% in 24 hours due to a combination of peak harvest and panic buying, which compounded the squeeze. As an extra fixture, YSRCP leader Kakani Govardhan Reddy used his April 30 village tour to flag that 'dotted lands' — disputed agricultural plots that the previous government claimed to have regularised by issuing patta titles — have quietly been re-categorised under the current coalition, locking the same farmers out of the same crop loans they were locked out of two governments ago. The fuel crisis and the dotted-lands flip together leave Andhra's harvest farmers in the rare position of being unable to either move a tractor or borrow against the field the tractor was meant to plough.