BRS hopes welfare schemes will steer it to victory again

Hyderabad: The BRS leaders are pinning hopes on the beneficiaries of welfare schemes for a favourable outcome in this election as they believe that the major chunk of voters in the forms of pensioners and those enjoying RythuBandhu would support the party.

Along with the beneficiaries, the party leaders believe that the last-minute surge in the voting would help the party. With most of the exit polls giving the edge to Congress in the State, the BRS leaders analysed the reports from the districts. According to a senior leader in the party, there are thousands of beneficiaries of various schemes, including pensions. There are many categories of pensioners, like widow, disabled, toddy tappers, weavers, HIV, Dialysis, etc. The BRS leader said there are more than 45 lakh pensioners in the State equally distributed in all the constituencies. In many of the constituencies, these pensioners would be the deciding factor. Giving an example, the BRS leader said that there were over 44,000 pensioners in the Bhongir Assembly segment and going by the poll percentage (which is about 90 per cent) about 2 lakh votes were cast. “In this circumstance, 44,000 would be a major chunk of voters. If not all, the majority of them may favour the BRS,” said the BRS leader.

Along with the pensioners, the beneficiaries under the RythuBandhu are also in large numbers and the BRS leader said that in Bhongir district alone there were 1.6 lakh beneficiaries under the RythuBandhu. The tricky situation here was that the RythuBandhu benefit was stopped by the Election Commission (EC) after a complaint by the Congress leaders. The EC had said that it was stopped because the video of T Harish Rao which went viral. There are many other scheme beneficiaries, like KCR Kits, KantiVelugu, Kalyana Lakshmi and others.

The BRS leaders expect that the higher voter turnout would benefit the ruling party. The party leaders recall that the voting percentage in the year 2018 was also high, and the beneficiary was the BRS. During 2018, the total vote percentage was 73.6 per cent and the BRS got 88 seats. However, this time around, the growth of the BJP may hamper the chances of the ruling party

The worrying factor for the party leaders is the delay in the loan waiver scheme. The BRS leaders tried to minimise the loss to some extent by waiving around 60 per cent of the beneficiaries.

The BRS working president KT Rama Rao, during his interactions with different people, said that the government waived off loans worth Rs 14,445 crore with his 75 per cent of the total loans. He also said that the government could not do it in time because of the lack of revenue during the Covid.

The BRS leaders were hoping that the people in GHMC would help the party to retain their seats. The BRS had a majority of 24 GHMC seats.