State craft: Chandrababu Naidu to axe freebies, save Rs 6,000 crore
With a financial crisis looming over AP, financing such schemes are difficult
By : s n c n acharyulu
Update: 2014-06-04 04:12 GMT
Hyderabad: The prestigious and popular welfare schemes of previous Congress governments, Arogyasri, fee reimbursement and free power will be done away with by the N. Chandrababu Naidu government in Andhra Pradesh.
The Telugu Desam has been a critic of the Arogyasri and fee reimbursement schemes that were introduced by YSR. With a financial crisis looming post the state’s bifurcation, financing such schemes will be difficult.
Mr Naidu is likely to axe the Arogyasri and fee reimbursement schemes since they have been criticised for helping others but not the poor for whom they were meant. Also likely to be terminated is the free power scheme which was introduced to help farmers of the Telangana region who depend on bore wells for agriculture whereas Seemandhra farmers use river water.
By axing these three schemes, the government can save around Rs 6,000 crore, according to a senior officer. The Arogyasri scheme gets around Rs 4,000 crore in the budget and the fee reimbursement scheme gets Rs 3,500 crore every year. Some 60 per cent of the expenditure for the two schemes used to go to Seemandhra and 40 per cent to Telangana region. By quashing these two schemes, the burden on the state government will come down to around Rs 4,500 crore. For the free power scheme, the government allots around Rs 4,300 crore as subsidy to the Energy department every year.