Shabbir Ali Flays Governor For Budget Speech "Lies"

Senior Congress leader and former minister Mohammed Ali Shabbir today described Telangana Governor Tamilisai Soundararajan's address to the state legislature as "factually incorrect" and "misleading".

Condemning the speech in a media statement, he alleged, "The Governor's claims on Telangana's annual growth rate, its GSDP and per capita income are factually incorrect. The Comptroller General and Auditor of India and the 15th Finance Commission have clearly pointed out serious auditing errors in the budget figures of the Telangana government. They have both accused the regime of doctoring figures with the aim of showing inflated revenues. Therefore, any estimation on growth figures based on those same inflated figures are erroneous and cannot be trusted."

"The state government's claims of having achieved a 17.24% increase in the annual growth rate, from 2014 to 2019, and its claims of a 114.71% rise in the GSDP in the last six years have been highlighted. However, the matter of its loans, running up to more than Rs 3 lakh crore, has not been addressed in any way. These loans have been eating up about 20% of Telangana's revenues. I wonder why the Governor cherry-picked facts, and chose to ignore the loans and their impact on Telangana's tax payers," he fumed.

Shabbir Ali also ridiculed another figure cited in the Governor's address, that of the state's per capita income, which had reportedly had increased from Rs 1,12,162 in 2013-14 to Rs 2,28,216 in 2019-20, and said, "If the per capita income figures are indeed true, then the Telangana government should declare that it has eradicated poverty and none of its citizens require any subsidies or pensions. What these discrepancies in the Budget address prove is that the Governor has only read the speech approved by Chief Minister K Chandrashekar Rao and his Cabinet. Although she is not at fault, she should have gotten the figures in the speech cross-checked by experts."

The Congress leader then advised the CM to stop making "fake claims" on the state's economy, saying that such claims had already damaged Telangana immensely.

"Telangana is now seven years old. It was a revenue surplus state at the time of its creation in 2014, and was one endowed with rich resources. Today, however, it its getting crushed under huge debts of over Rs 3 lakh crore due to the misled policies of the KCR regime. The regime has been doctoring revenue figures from the start. If the average annual revenue of Telangana has indeed been Rs 1 lakh crore, then the state should have collected Rs 6 lakh crore by now. Why then did the government need to borrow Rs 3 lakh crore? The CM must come clean at least now, as we stand on the brink of financial collapse, and he must release a White Paper on government spending immediately," he said.

The former minister then faulted the speech for not addressing various crucial issues, including that of rising unemployment in the state, the fitment to be given to government employees, and the filling of 50,000 vacant job posts in various government department, and reiterated that he felt that the Governor's address was full of factually incorrect data and "vague descriptions" of the government's policies.