White paper on economy to generate heat in Assembly

Hyderabad: The two-day session of the State Assembly beginning from Wednesday promises to be a highly stormy one. The reason is that the Government would present a white paper on the state’s economy in an attempt to “expose the omissions and commissions” of the previous government and how its decisions had pushed the state into a debt trap.

Chief Minister Revanth Reddy, Finance Minister Bhatti Vikarmarka and others are said to be busy discussing different aspects of the state financial management in the last ten years and bring out a white paper which would become difficult for the BRS to counter. This issue is said to have even figured during the meeting the Chief Minister and Finance Minister had with former RBI governor and economist Raghuram Rajan on Sunday.

They were also in consultation with some more financial experts and irrigation experts to study the expenditure incurred on the multi-crore projects, their viability and the enhancement of the projects’ cost as well as change of designs in the middle of the construction of lift irrigation schemes like Kaleshwaram and Palamuru Rangareddy by the previous government.

All the Secretaries of finance, revenue, irrigation and related departments have been asked to come up with the details of various schemes, year-wise expenditure incurred on them and capital expenditure for the last 10 years. It is learnt that most of the departments had already furnished the details to the finance department.

Sources said the white paper would contain details of institutional loans borrowed by the previous government for irrigation project construction and other infrastructure development Mission Bhagiratha and Mission Kakatiya and the sale of government lands and the lease of other prime properties like Outer Ring Road.

A report on the performance of Revenue generating wings - Transport, Excise and Prohibition, Commercial Taxes and Stamps and Registration would also be prepared to assess the revenue increase every year.

In the backdrop of this, the BRS is said to have given the responsibility to effectively counter the government point by point to former finance minister T Harish Rao. Harish is also said to be taking the support of some economic experts, including former state advisor (Finance) GR Reddy. It wants to prove that the ruling party’s white paper was an act of vindictiveness. Their stand would be that the BRS government had raised additional loans for asset creation and has been very prudent in financial management.