TDP terms Budget 'anti-people'

Terming the 2010-11 State budget as ‘anti-people’ with ‘lopsided’ priorities, main Opposition in the State Assembly, the Telugu Desam Party came down on Chief Minister K Rosaiah like the proverbial ton of bricks on Thursday.

Initiating the debate on the Budget, senior Tdp member R Chandrasekhar Reddy said the so-called ‘tax-free’ budget was possible since the Congress Government had hiked taxes outside the budget several times.

He said these hikes had led to the rise in prices of essential commodities. He said the hike in bus fares and a hike in power tariff seems inevitable.

Chandrasekhar Reddy lambasted the Centre and the State governments, saying they competed with each other to levy taxes on everything under the Sun. He sarcastically commented that only the air that people breathed is left untaxed.

Reddy said the so-called ''farmer-friendly'' government had allotted only a meagre 2.5 per cent of the total budget for Agriculture sector.

Along with Vidarbha region in Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh topped in the incidence of suicides by farmers with the number of such deaths crossing the 6,000 mark, he claimed. Only a namesake allocation had been made for ''Pavala Vaddi scheme'' in the budget, though the Government had earmarked a bigger allocation for publicity, he noted.