Former Minister Dokka Manikya Vara Prasada Rao on Wednesday shrugged off the dismal performance by the Congress at the recently concluded general elections and said that the seats won by the YSRC led by its president Y.S. Jaganmohan Reddy in Seemandhra region actually belonged to the Congress.
Addressing a media conference at his office here, Mr. Rao said that the YSRC president did not win a single seat by himself. “All the 67 seats won by the YSRC were actually belonging to the Congress and the late YSR. Had Mr. Jagan put in some extra effort, he would have secured another 2 per cent of vote share,” Mr. Rao said.
Decentralisation soughtEarlier, in a letter addressed to the Chief Minister-designate, N. Chandrababu Naidu, Mr. Rao advocated greater delimitation and mooted creation of more districts to decentralise the administration in the residuary State of Andhra Pradesh.
Every Parliamentary constituency could be made into districts for greater administrative convenience, he suggested. In Guntur, a separate district for Palnadu could be carved out with Gurazala as its headquarters. A separate district with headquarters at Bapatla was also a possibility, he said.
On the proposed capital, Mr. Rao said that the new capital should have a historical lineage and suggested that Amaravathi and Kondaveedu could be considered as ideal options . Both the regions were centrally located and had abundant water resources, he pointed out.
Mr. Rao also demanded that the new State be renamed as `Telugu Nadu' and urged the new government to continue implementing the SC/ST Sub-plan Acts.
