Senior BJP leader and MLA T. Raja Singh has demanded Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao to withdraw the power tariff hike and also take up paddy procurement across the State without any further delay on Thursday.
In an open letter to the Chief Minister, he said the citizens are already burdened due to the loss of livelihoods and economic distress because of the ongoing COVID pandemic and a state which boasts of a surplus budget should not burden the common folk further.
Mr. Singh blamed the TRS Government’s “lopsided policies for the TS being pushed into a debt trap and cleaning up the treasury”. The regime has gone for high priced power purchases and the power distribution companies were not given budget allocations leaving them with ₹50,000 crore default payments hole and to cover up the poor and the middle class are being forced to pay for high tariff, he charged.
At the same time, the government has not bothered to deal with power theft or chronic defaulters of power bills and illegal connections. It is unfortunate that the government departments too are not paying for usage of power and this has reached to the tune of ₹12,598 crore.
The paddy procurement imbroglio is only meant to ensure people’s attention is shifted from the power and RTC hikes. Instead of taking steps to supply raw rice as per the agreement made with the Centre, the TRS leaders are resorting to drama on the roads, he maintained.
The party floor leader in the Assembly also alleged that the Food Corporation of India (FCI) had noticed a scam with 1.81 lakh quintals of paddy missing from the rice mills and wanted a full fledged probe into it or said it could be assumed that the “TRS regime is hand in glove with the rice millers”, he added.
In a separate press statement, BJP leader Gudur Narayana Reddy said the “bankrupt TRS government is unable to procure paddy this season and hence, wants to throw the blame on the Centre to escape from its responsibility”.
“KCR has been trying to defame the BJP as he is afraid of its growing popularity. He has bragged in the past that the government would procure each grain of paddy and encouraged farmers to grow it on large scale, now it was his responsibility to procure the grain,” he added.
