Andhra Pradesh has made huge strides since 2014 when the Telugu Desam government assumed office, and “it is our aim to make it one of the three best States in the country by 2022 and the best by 2029, in a decade,” Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu has said.
He was reviewing the performance of his government in his response to the debate on the Vote-on-Account Budget in the Assembly on Friday, the last day of the Budget session. He said Andhra Pradesh had registered double-digit growth in the past five years consistently.
“Yet, our per capita income is still the lowest among the southern States in spite of the huge strides we have made. A huge blow was inflicted on the State with bifurcation and the BJP-led Union Government did not keep any of the promises it had made to the people of the State and did not implement the provisions of the AP Re-organisation Act, 2014. Undeterred, we have gone ahead and covered a lot of ground,” he said.
‘Achievements’
Listing “the achievements of the TDP government in the past five years,” Naidu said the mega Polavaram irrigation project on the Godavari would be completed by the end of the year and water would be released the next kharif season itself.
“We are going ahead with the construction of the new capital city, Amaravati, even though the Centre has allocated only a paltry sum of ₹1,500 crore,” he said.
Three new ports — Machilipatnam in Krishna district, Bhavanapadu in Srikakulam district, and Ramayyapatnam in Prakasam district — are coming up and “the Centre has not fulfilled its promise to build a major port at Dugarajapatnam in Nellore district.” The State would move ahead with port-led development, he said.
He spoke of the Kadapa steel plant, the petro-chemical complex at Kakinada and several other projects which, he said, the Centre should have taken up. “Therefore, the State Government itself is taking up these projects,” he said.
Naidu also spoke of the many welfare schemes — payment of ₹2,000 pension to the aged and widows and ₹3,000 to the handicapped, the unemployment allowance of ₹2,000 to the jobless, and waiver of farm loans of ₹24,000 crorein the State. He spoke of the assistance of ₹10,000 crore to everymember of women's self-help groups under the ‘Pasupu-kumkuma’ scheme.
He expressed confidence that the people would vote him back to power “in spite of the politics of collusion being played by the BJP and the Opposition YSR Congress.”
Vision 2029
Earlier, State Finance Minister Y Ramakrishnudu said that the Centre still had to release ₹1,16,000 crore under various heads and was refusing to do so.
Assembly Speaker K Sivaprasad released the Vision 2029 document prepared by the State government.