KCR's Hyd dreams are unrealistic: Shabbir Ali

Telangana Pradesh Congress Committee (TPCC) Vice-President Mohammed Ali Shabbir has accused Chief Minister K Chandrashekar Rao of taking people on a ride with his unrealistic dreams for Hyderabad.

Addressing a press conference at Gandhi Bhavan here on Saturday, Shabbir Ali listed out the major promises made by KCR for the development of Hyderabad. He said KCR, who completed seven months in power on January 2, on an average made one major promise every week. The Chief Minister is apparently trying to take advantage of poor public memory and making a new promise every time while assuming that people would not question him on the fulfillment of other promises made earlier.

Citing instances, he said there has been no progress on the promises of shifting Chanchalguda Jail and Hyderabad Race Course from the Old City. In fact, Home Minister recently laid the foundation stone for a shopping mall at Chanchalguda Jail to sell the products manufactured by jail inmates. He used catchy phrases to attract media attention while making other big promises like transforming Hyderabad into a software hub like Silicon Valley, hardware hub like Shanghai, Technology Development Bank, Wifi City, world’s tallest tower, skyscraper zone, skyways, Bangkok traffic model, etc.,

Shabbir Ali said that KCR looks confused and wants to do everything at once. It would take nearly Rs 2 lakh crore to implement the promises made by KCR for Hyderabad alone. Of nearly Rs 1 lakh crore budget of Telangana State, the Plan expenditure amounts to nearly Rs 48,000 crore. Therefore, State Government would have to utilize its entire Plan budget for the next four years only for the development of Hyderabad. Therefore, these promises are complete unrealistic, he said.

Further, the Congress leader said that the Chief Minister should explain the utilisation of these projects. While the cleaning of Hussainsagar is a welcome move, the plan to construct world’s tallest tower needs clarification by the government. What will be the immediate use of world’s tallest tower in Hyderabad? Similarly, before having a skyscraper zone, the government needs to justify its move by showing the need for so much of office space in the city.  He said skyscrapers would need strong supporting infrastructure like provision for drinking water, drainage, energy, fire safety, etc., Therefore, the government should first create the infrastructure and then construct big buildings.

Shabbir Ali also ridiculed KCR’s promise of having a new airport in northern part of Hyderabad. Presently, the city is having four airports at Shamshabad, Begumpet, Dundigal and Hakeempet. The Rajiv Gandhi International Airport was connected with Nehru ORR, PVNR Express Way and other link roads. Therefore, except for people residing in Adilabad, the travel time for people residing in all other districts got reduced to two-three hours. Further, the State Government had entered into a MoU with the GMR authorities for not having another airport in the city for a specified period. For the same reason, commercial operations at Begumpet airport were close after RGIA became functional. He advised KCR not to mislead the people by hiding these facts.

Instead of fleecing the common people with fake and unrealistic promises, the Congress leader advised KCR to focus on the completion of ongoing projects like Metro Rail.

Shabbir Ali said that the previous Congress Government developed Hyderabad by spending over Rs 1 lakh crore from 2004-2014 and never created any hype or did showoff. He said Hyderabad was recently ranked as the second best among the world's "Must See" destinations by the reputed international travel journal National Geographic Traveler. This was due to the 10 years rule of Congress, not seven-month misrule of TRS Government, he claimed.

When asked for reaction on KCR’s praise for Last Nizam Mir Osman Ali, the Congress leader said he agrees with the Chief Minister’s contention that Last Nizam made lot of contribution for development of Hyderabad and Telangana in sectors like education, infrastructure and public health.