Hyderabad: TRS chief Mr K. Chandrasekhar Rao is banking on the 450-plus welfare schemes launched by his government in the past four-and-half years, to tide him smoothly through the elections. Mr Rao has confidence that the welfare schemes will help his party win the elections.
However, at the ground level, not all people are satisfied by the welfare schemes. For example, the people are happy about the pension amount being raised but they are unhappy about its implementation. As the payment delivery has shifted from post offices to banks, people in villages are now forced to travel to towns to collect the amount.
Mr Rao has introduced more than 450 schemes and spent over Rs 2 lakh crore. in the last four and half years. Every family in Telangana has been benefited by one government scheme or the other; some families were benefited with multiple schemes. Under Rythu Bandhu scheme TRS government provided Rs 4,000 per acre per crop in cash as input subsidy benefiting 58 lakh farmers. But in this scheme tenant farmers were left without any benefit. Every village has 30 percent tenant farmers and this entire section is opposing the scheme. Another issue in this scheme is that the marginal land holdings of two acres or less get meagre assistance while the large land holders of 10 acres or more get larger amounts which has led to dissatisfaction of small land holders.
Kalyan Lakshmi and Shadi Mubarak schemes have got very good response as they provided financial assistance to the family when their daughter was getting married, but there were complaints of corruption in this scheme.
Another scheme, 24x7 free power supply to the farming sector was one of the first achievements of TRS government. But the problem faced by small land holders with 124x7 free power supply led to more exploitation of water by the rich land holders.
Next, the TRS government had itself admitted on not implementing the 2BHK houses fully due to various reasons. But the promise where the TRS really goofed up was the main assurance made by them during the 2014 elections to the farmers of loan waiver. The way this scheme was implemented by the state government did not provide them any benefit. While assistance was provided for four instalments, the interest on remaining debt piled up and finally the farmers felt that their crop loans remained intact.
The prestigious Mission Bhagiratha also backfired. The government planned to provide drinking water to all the households in the state, but failed.
The schemes introduced by TRS government may have got a good response from the people but its failure in proper implementation has got the government several brickbats, and the going in the upcoming assembly elections may not be as good as KCR imagines.
