My Delhi mission is a success, claims Naidu

HYDERABAD: Chief minister- designate of the residuary state of Andhra Pradesh, N Chandrababu Naidu, has said he was very much satisfied over the way prime minister Narendra Modi and other Union ministers have responded to his pleas with regard to lending a helping hand to Seemandhra for its reconstruction.

Naidu came back here on Saturday morning after concluding his two-day trip to the national capital, during which the chief minister-elect of Seemandhra had met a host of Union Ministers besides Prime Minister Narendra Modi to plead with them to liberally help the truncated AP on various fronts for its reconstruction.

Soon after arriving at the Shamshabad airport, he visited his party headquarters, NTR Bhavan, here and held meetings with party seniors. Later, during a brief interaction with mediapersons, Naidu claimed that his first mission to Delhi was a success as Prime Minister Modi, Union finance minister Arun Jaitley and other key ministers had positively responded to his requests for lending a helping hand to Seemandhra, 'which will face about Rs 14,000 crore revenue deficit and will be not able to give salaries to government employees after June 2, from which day AP will be formally bifurcated'.

Reiterating his complaint that the then UPA government had done complete injustice to Seemandhra while bifurcating assets and liabilities as well as electricity between the two states by applying different parameters for different key issues, Naidu said that when he had raised all these points before the prime minister and other ministers, they all heard him keenly.

Reiterating that grave injustice had been meted out to Seemandhra with regard to division of power utilities and sharing of electricity as the then Centre had taken 'power consumption' as sole criterion for distributing electricity in between two States instead of population ratio, Naidu said he had taken the issue to the notice of the Prime Minister.

He, however, clarified that he had not asked the Prime Minister to reduce the electricity quota allotted to Telangana. Instead of that he had sought the Centre to provide additional share of electricity from NTPC to Seemandhra to redress the injustice done to it on power front.

'When I requested the Centre to allot more share of electricity to Seemandhra by giving additional quota of power from NTPC without reducing the same for Telangana, the Centre has positively responded,' he said.