The road to the completion of six months in office by Telangana Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao on Tuesday was not a smooth one as he had a running battle with his Andhra Pradesh counterpart N. Chandrababu Naidu on one side besides weathering criticism on the other for several failures of the government on the home turf.
Mr. Rao, during his last 180 days in office, made concrete efforts to put in place welfare programmes, particularly social security pensions and ration cards. His government’s exercise to go for fresh enrolment for pensions and ration cards drew flak on the ground that names of several aged people were omitted. Although the government claimed that it would not deny benefits to the eligible persons, the promise has not cut ice with the agitated sections.
On the development front, the Chief Minister vowed to restore the minor irrigation tanks in rural areas even as his government announced the grandiose Water Grid scheme to provide potable drinking water to all habitations in the State. Panchayat Raj and R & B roads are in for a facelift with massive action plan to improve road connectivity. Sufficient allocation has been made in the recent budget. However, Mr. Rao has promised to transform district headquarters such as Karimnagar into London and others into New York. Strangely, several cities and towns are still grappling with civic as well as other problems.
Unlike the uproar in Andhra Pradesh over the crop loan waiver, the TS government has done it with relative ease by transferring the first instalment of Rs. 4,250 crore. This has enabled farmers to renew their loans. But a more serious issue that continues to loom large is the suicide by farmers. A long spell of severe power cuts saw standing crops on thousands of acres wither away. The government is yet to act firmly to bail out the farmers and the families of the deceased.
On a token basis, the government launched three acres of land for poor SCs on Independence Day, only to realise that in several districts, it was finding it difficult to identify suitable land.
The sparring with the AP government began with the drowning of engineering students in Beas River in Himachal Pradesh as both governments arranged flights to carry victims’ relatives. The spat extended to the conduct of Intermediate exams in the latest instance. Not to speak about the refusal to reimburse tuition fee to students from Andhra Pradesh, there were several issues like sharing of power, water, public sector institutions and even funds from a corpus of workers’ welfare, over which the governments squabbled.
Nonetheless, Mr. Rao was credited with taking steps for industrialisation by announcing an investor friendly policy, ensuring the safety of women, issuing health cards to government staff, lifting cases against those who were booked in the Telangana agitation and providing assistance to families of martyrs. He was praised for his marathon meetings with officials. However, he was handicapped by the delay in the division of IAS, IPS and forest service officers between the two States.
The Telangana government took up a household survey which drew flak on the ground that it was aimed at isolating the Andhra population. University students were also unhappy with it over the decision to regularise the services of contract staff.
