Telangana Budget Unrealistic & Misleading: Congress

Senior Congress leader and former minister Mohammed Ali Shabbir today described the Telangana budget for 2020-21 presented by Finance Minister T Harish Rao in the Assembly on Sunday as completely unrealistic, fictitious and imaginary.

Addressing the media at Gandhi Bhavan along with senior leaders MLA Seethakka, former union minister Balram Naik, former MPs Mallu Ravi, T Rajaiah and Konda Vishveshwar Reddy, former MLA T Rammohan and others, Shabbir Ali said that a Rs 1,82,914 crore budget, an increase of a whopping Rs 40,762 crore compared to the revised budget of last year, was totally unrealistic and misleading.

He also pointed out that Chief Minister K Chandrashekar Rao had presented an Vote-on-Account budget of Rs 1,82,017 crore for 2019-20 in February 2019.

Shabbir Ali said that the TRS government derived some pleasure from misleading the people with wrong statistics and misleading data. He said that it routinely made allocations under various heads but at the end of the financial year spent nothing under those heads. Citing instances, he said that Rs 6,000 crores were allocated in the 2019-20 budget for farm loan waiver, but that remained unspent. This year too Rs 6,225 crore had been allocated for the purpose.

Similarly, Rs 500 crore were earmarked for unemployment allowance last year, but in this year's budget that head had been completely removed, and there was actually no mention of unemployment or youth in the entire budget speech.

Shabbir Ali also slammed the TRS government for slashing the budget for minorities' welfare. He said that Rs 1,884.43 crore were allotted for minorities' welfare in 2018-19, and that was reduced to Rs 1,369 crore in 2019-20 citing the economic slowdown. This year that had been further confined to Rs 1,518 crore.

"When the state government can increase its spending by over Rs 40,000 crore, then why has the minorities' welfare budget been slashed compared to 2018-19?" he asked.