Hyderabad: ‘KCR Runam Theerchukundaam (Repay debt to KCR)’ will be the main slogan for the TRS for the upcoming Assembly elections. With indications of early polls, party sources said TRS president and Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao had zeroed in on urging the people to ‘Repay debt to KCR’ as a campaign strategy to highlight how the TRS government’s initiatives in education, health, irrigation, agriculture, industries, power sectors over four years had improved the quality of lives of crores of people.
The TRS wants to project that the people are indebted to Mr Rao for achieving the 60-year old dream of statehood apart from a slew of development and welfare programmes, including 24x7 power to the entire state, round the clock free power to farmers and launching irrigation projects like Kaleshwaram.
The campaign will highlight that the government has set up over 500 residential schools for BCs, SCs, STs, minorities, residential junior and degree colleges for girls and is providing Rs 1 lakh financial assistance to perform the marriage of girls from all communities (Kalyana Laxmi, Shaadi Mubarak).
Also on the ‘runam’ list are purified water for all households through Mission Bhagiratha, disbursement of Rs 12,000 crore to farmers every year through Rythu Bandhu, Rs 5 lakh free life insurance to farmers, KCR Kits (each costing Rs 12,000) for institutional deliveries in government hospitals, distribution of over 1 crore sheep to the Yadav community, thousands of new industries through TS-iPASS offering over 7 lakh jobs.
The party wants to campaign that people are indebted to Mr Rao for achieving the milestones in four years, and they can repay their debt to him by voting for the party. So far, the TRS has banked solely on the Telangana sentiment to fetch votes in all the elections since its inception in 2001 till 2014. After bifurcation, the party feels that it could no longer use the Telangana sentiment to gain votes in 2019 elections.
“As a ruling party which formed the first government in Telangana state, we cannot depend on Telangana sentiment any more. We can only talk about our development and welfare programmes done in our first term and seek a second term based on our performance,” a party source said. “We want KCR to be our focal point of campaigning because he remains the most popular leader in Telangana even today. There is no match to him in any other party. We want to highlight KCR with a caption 'repay debt to KCR'," the source said.
