Telangana BJP head Bandi Sanjay Kumar today expressed his displeasure at the Telangana government over the issue of the "stagnation" of the Information Technology Investment Region (ITIR) project, and alleged that its negligence had led to the "non-implementation" of the project.
Taking up the matter with Chief Minister K Chandrashekar Rao in a letter, the BJP leader alleged that the TRS government and the party's leaders were trying to hide all their own "mistakes" by writing letters to the Centre every other day regarding the issue, and criticised them for trying to blame their own "failures" on the Modi government.
"The main objective of the ITIR project was to set up IT, hardware and ESDM industries in and around Hyderabad. This would have generated lakhs of jobs for the people of Telangana. However, the TRS government's own lackadaisical attitude caused the project to fail. Now it is blaming the Centre for its own failures. How can the Centre bolster the state's development if the state government itself does not take the steps to do so? The KCR government could not even manage to send the requisite quarterly reports on basic infrastructure to the Union electronics and IT departments. It is pretending like the Centre is to blame for the state's developmental issues," he said.
Kumar also alleged that the state government's neglectful attitude had resulted in its failure to extend the MMTS and Metro Rail lines from the Falaknuma area to the Rajiv Gandhi International Airport.
He added that these "ploys" of the state government to make the BJP "look bad", in the run-up to the upcoming MLC elections in the state, would not work, and that the people of Telangana would see right through them.
The leader's tirade follows the claims made by IT and Industries Minister K T Rama Rao in a letter the latter recently wrote to Union IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad. In the letter, KTR had reportedly said that the TRS government had appealed to the Centre to sanction funds for the ITIR numerous times over the past few years but had received "no response whatsoever".
(KTR has been at the receiving end of a lot of rebuke from both
the Congress and
the BJP for his comments against the two rivals of his party. His claims about employment generation under the TRS' rule have also elicited strong responses from the Opposition.)