TS to TG: Centre approves new prefix for Telangana vehicle number plates

Hyderabad: Vehicle registration number plate in Telangana will now have a TG prefix.

The government of India has approved TS to TG on vehicle registration plates.

Ministry of Road Transport and Highways issued a gazette notification effective immediately. This change aims to enhance regulatory clarity and effectiveness.

Now, Telangana will be represented by the character TG instead of TS in vehicle registration numbers.

This change will also be applied to new cars and all official communications. Accordingly, the authorities of the transport department are working on it.

This all began during the Telangana agitation movement. After the bifurcation of Telangana from Andhra Pradesh in 2014, the Centre even allotted the letters TG to Telangana State. However, Bharat Rashtra Samithi President Chandrashekhar Rao had opted for the code ‘TS’ as the state abbreviation, reportedly due to numerological reasons. In September 2022, Telangana chief minister A Revanth Reddy, then Telangana Pradesh Congress Committee (TPCC) president, said that the Congress party would go back to the previous practice of abbreviating Telangana (TG) in all vehicle registration numbers if voted to power.

The CM also earlier noted that the word ‘state’ does not appear in the alphabet portion of the vehicle registration number in any other state, like Uttar Pradesh (UP), Karnataka (KA), Andhra Pradesh (AP), Madhya Pradesh (MP) and Tamil Nadu (TN). According to him, TS is simply TRS without the ‘R’ in between. Then, the Congress leader Koturi Manavata Roy also wrote TG on his vehicle instead of TS.