Tadepalli, 14 July: YSR Congress Party State General Secretary Gadikota Srikanth Reddy said the Chandrababu Naidu government had completely failed to respond to the deepening agrarian crisis, leaving farmers to suffer under severe drought conditions without any relief or planning. He said three months into the agricultural season, farmers were yet to begin sowing due to the absence of rains and water, while the government had neither formulated a contingency plan nor conducted even a single review meeting with officials. With no possibility of water being released from Srisailam, he said the government had abandoned farmers at a critical time. Instead of addressing agriculture, Chandrababu was using every public platform for abusive political rhetoric because he had no answers to the questions being raised by the YSRCP.
Srikanth Reddy said the government must stop political abuse and immediately focus on resolving farmers' problems. He questioned the utilisation of the Rs. 50,000 crore raised in the name of Amaravati and asked what development the present government had delivered beyond the projects executed during Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy's tenure, including ports, medical colleges and fishing harbours. He questioned the need for constructing 5.4 million square feet of buildings and spending thousands of crores on an Assembly that functions for only around 40 days a year, while the state continued to accumulate massive debt. He also criticised the Cabinet for ignoring public issues and instead focusing on targeting social media activists and land acquisition. He termed the arrest of Nagarjuna Yadav over remarks made two years ago as a vindictive action and questioned the government's borrowings, its failure to review the agrarian crisis, corruption in Amaravati, and the custodial death of Sai Krishna.
Meanwhile, former Uravakonda MLA Y. Visweswara Reddy condemned the deliberate distortion of his remarks made during the YSRCP Rayalaseema Lift Irrigation Task Force meeting in Nellore. He said his comments exposing corruption in the Handri-Neeva canal lining works and stressing the need to fight for Rayalaseema's water rights had been twisted by sections of the media and subsequently used by TDP leaders for political propaganda.
He reiterated that the YSRCP government had prioritised diverting Krishna floodwaters to Rayalaseema projects, whereas the present government had sidelined priority irrigation works and focused on contracts under the guise of canal lining. Visweswara Reddy said Chandrababu had halted the Rayalaseema Lift Irrigation Scheme after yielding to the neighbouring Telangana government and should apologise to the people of Rayalaseema instead of misrepresenting his statements. He said the clarification was being issued to ensure that the public was not misled by false narratives.
*AP tops in real estate, not investment*
