Lashing out at the Centre yet again for "neglecting" Telangana, IT and Industries Minister K T Rama Rao today asserted that the state's MPs would fight for the state's rights in the Parliament.
Rao claimed that the country's youngest state had regularly received step-motherly treatment at the hands of the BJP-led Centre, which had "repeatedly ignored" the pleas of the TRS government for developmental funds and for project permits.
"Though the Centre releases funds to the BJP-led states of the country quite regularly, it does not extend any monetary aid to our state despite repeated please from our end. This denial of funds to the state has not only hindered development but has also deprived millions of secure employment opportunities," the minister alleged.
He then demanded that the Centre sanction the much-hyped Information Technology Investment Region (ITIR) project which, Union IT and Electronics Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad revealed in a statement in Parliament, had been shelved.
KTR also demanded that the Centre immediately fulfil the promises made to Telangana in the Andhra Pradesh Reorganisation Act (2014), including the setting up of the Kazipet railway coach factory and the Bayyaram steel plant. He warned the NDA regime that the state government would devise ways to register its protest against the Centre, and would "achieve the rights of the state" at any cost.
As the debate around employment generation in Telangana gets more heated in the run-up to the MLC elections in the graduates' constituencies of Hyderabad-Rangareddy-Mahabubnagar and Warangal-Khammam-Nalgonda, the TRS, the Congress and the BJP have been launching scathing attacks on each other for "failing" to create jobs for the state's youth. Recently, TPCC head N Uttam Kumar Reddy had
lambasted both the TRS and the BJP for having "betrayed" Telangana by "sabotaging its economy" and "ruining the careers of lakhs of youth".