: Bowing to BJP’s protest, Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao has agreed to call an all-party meeting to discuss the change of Metro rail alignment proposed by him.
The meeting with all the city legislators and L&T officials would be held after the end of the present Assembly session.
This assurance was given by Mr. Rao after the BJP members stalled the proceedings in the Assembly on Thursday over his announcing the change of route in consultation with the Majlis legislator, Akbaruddin Owaisi. They cited newspaper photographs of the meeting. The repeated stalling forced the Chair to adjourn the House twice.
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The BJP served an adjournment motion and as soon as the House met, BJP floor leader K. Laxman demanded that the motion to be taken up for discussion. He wondered how the Chief Minister could announce change in alignment after discussion with the MIM member when the House was in session.
Both the Speaker, S. Madhusudhan Chary, and Legislative Affairs minister, T. Harish Rao, asked the agitating members not to stall the proceedings since an important question about allotment of government lands to IMG Bharata Academy was to come up. But the BJP members stood their ground. The Speaker then adjourned the House for ten minutes and it reassembled only to be adjourned again as the BJP members raised slogans.
When the House met again, the Chief Minister maintained that when he was discussing with the HMR managing director and other officials about acquisition of land on the Greenland-Jubilee Hills road, the Majlis MLA, Akbaruddin Owaisi, incidentally came to meet him for a different purpose. He agreed that he had insisted on the Metro rail going behind the Assembly building and the Women’s College in Sultan Bazar. In the old city also the alignment needs to be changed since there were places of worship of Hindus, Muslims and Christians.
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The Chief Minister expressed happiness at the High Court vacating a case in this connection on Thursday.