Rajasekhara Reddy statues top illegal statues list

Hyderabad: Statues of late chief minister Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy have topped the list of illegal statues that are blocking the right of way on various roads in AP. The Roads and Buildings department has submitted a report to the government after carrying out a detailed survey on statutes.

In Visakhapatnam district, in the two revenue divisions of Paderu and Visakhapatnam alone, there are around 50 illegal statues. As many as 47 of those are YSR’s. The R&B department has mentioned in the report that these statues are erected on government lands and they occupy the right of way.

Roads and Buildings department reports state that footpaths and central dividers have been encroached. In majority of the cases no permission has been obtained from local civic authorities.

After YSR’s death his followers, Congress and YSRC activists and leaders and his son YS Jagan Mohan Reddy had set up statutes on a large scale across Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. Statues of other political and national leaders were erected much prior to filing of the writ petition in the High Court against the statues in 2011.

YSRC leaders are now demanding that the state government conduct a survey of all existing statues and not those set up since 2011. A government order in 2013 had stated that if statutes or monuments were unavoidable, they should be erected only on large traffic islands, public gardens, parks and premises of government buildings, town halls or places of public importance.