RRR set to become Dy Speaker

Vijayawada : The stage is set for Undi TDP MLA Raghurama Krishnam Raju to become the Deputy Speaker of the State Assembly. The alliance parties on Wednesday filed three separate sets of nominations proposing the name of Raju. He will be formally declared elected unopposed on Thursday. It may be recalled that Raghurama Krishnam Raju who is popularly known as ‘RRR’ was subjected to a lot of harassment during the previous regime. He, according to Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu, is the only MP in the country who was not allowed to visit his constituency even once in five years. He also said RRR was illegally arrested and subjected to third degree torture and Raju was still fighting those cases in court of law.

The BJP MLA and panel chairperson Vishnukumar Raju said that from Thursday onwards, RRR will have greater responsibility of ensuring smooth conduct of the House and see that all members get enough time to discuss various issues.

He will not have a chance to express his views and make comments loaded with punchlines anymore.

RRR thanked the chair for giving him a last chance to speak in the Assembly. RRR revealed that as MP who was barred from entering the state by previous government, spent most of his time in Delhi and had been closely interacting with the officials of Union Finance Ministry, Finance Minister etc., exposing the omissions and commissions of the previous government which helped in preventing them from raising Rs 1 lakh crore loans or else the debt burden of this government would have shot up much high.

He said it is easy for the opposition MLAs and their leader to make all kinds of comments on this budget sitting somewhere but the fact is it took five months for this government to pull the state out of ICU. Though a lot of companies, including TCS and Reliance have promised to come to AP and many more are showing interest, it will take some time for them to turn into revenue generating sources.

Meanwhile, the government must not only take the state forward in development but also implement the welfare schemes. He said as per FRBM norms a state should have zero revenue deficit and fiscal deficit of three percent. He said states like UP and Odisha which used to be high deficit states have now become surplus while AP became a deficit state. This trend needs to be reversed.

He called upon the MLAs to be with the people and explain the measures the government was taking and rebut the mala fide propaganda of the opposition.