Hyderabad: The Rs 860 crore given to the housing department is meant to meet certain financial conditions to secure loans from banks besides clearing arrears of Indiramma houses of the past.
The Water Grid project is being taken up at a cost of over Rs 40,000 crore. The government has secured loans of Rs 15,000 crore and it continues to depend on loans to complete the project, raising questions over the viability of the project due to a huge interest burden.
The then Chief Minister Y.S. Rajasekhar Reddy had first launched a Constituency Development Fund, doling out Rs 50 lakh to each MLA. This was later renamed SDF in 2011-12 with a Rs 400-crore corpus by then Chief Minister N. Kiran Kumar Reddy. Both had faced criticism of using these funds to build their political base, to buy peace with detractors and to take up ‘Operation Akarsh’ to lure opposition MLAs.
Mr K. Chandrasekhar Rao followed in their footsteps by allotting Rs 500 crore under SDF in the last Budget and has now ensured a nine-fold increase to Rs 4,675 crore.
