Can IT be panacea for AP’s woes?

AP Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu sounds poll bugle two-and-a-half years before his term ends, with a resolve to wage an IT-aided blitzkrieg against his rivals. The CM piloted a training programme at K L University at Vaddeswaram in Guntur district a few days ago, which is intended to technologically empower the party leadership at all levels.

Naidu ensured that all the participants, who included MPs, MLAs, presidents of district party units and in-charges of Assembly constituencies, had had an app named Kaiser Permanent (KP) downloaded on their mobiles and received a training on use of the particular application.

To quote a party politburo member, the app helps the party leadership track the movements of workers at different levels and assess their performance. This indicates the party chief’s mood to keep his party rank and file on toes and get in constant touch with people at the grassroots-level well before the elections. The party leaders were also sensitised on use of social media to propagate the government programmes and counter the opposition’s campaign, besides harnessing IT in taking the welfare programmes to the people and receiving feedback from the latter.

Of course, Babu has a sufficient breather as he doesn’t have to face any election within the near future, except the polls to five municipal corporations involving urban voters. Yet, he is determined to gear the party apparatus and keep it busy so that he could narrow the gap between the party and the government. There is a dominant feeling in the party that Naidu is spending his full time on the government affairs as the CM while leaving party to his son and politburo member Nara Lokesh.

Feedback the CM is said to have procured from independent agencies suggests that there has been a groundswell of anti-incumbency sentiment in some sections over his government’s perceived poor show in certain areas like housing for the poor, shallowness in the government’s claims on free sand policy and signs of discontentment in the backward Rayalaseema and north coastal Andhra areas over his development buzz revolving around capital.

Will IT alone bail out Naidu in the next elections? “It is only a medium but not an end itself,” pat comes from a former TDP minister with a warning that it could become a suicidal for the party if anyone believes that technology is panacea to every evil. Of course, the electoral reverses Naidu as an IT poster boy suffered in 2004 general elections remain a lesson. When IT helped him become an apple of the eyes of a few urban middle class voters, distress conditions marked by massive suicides in rural areas and reforms in power sector eventually saw him out of power. Service sector as a whole, including IT, contributes only 10.5 per cent to the gross state domestic product (GSDP) during his current regime.

CPI (M) State secretary P Madhu warned that Naidu will have to burn his fingers if he fails to erase his popular sobriquet as a tech-savvy. Unrest on the industrial front resulted in loss of employment for over 3.5 lakh workers and ports, airports and the other road projects and industrial corridors are threatening to displace a large number of farmers from their lands across the state. Still, Naidu appears unfazed and remains unchallenged by the opposition.

The opposition remains an undivided house and the YSRC chief YS Jaganmohan Reddy fails to strike the right chord as he continues to run the show from his Lotus Pond residence in Hyderabad even after the administration moved to the new capital. The sporadic movements launched by the Left parties without the main opposition party of the YSRC on public issues failed to challenge the Naidu’s authority.

By: G Nagaraja