Note ban has Telangana CM redrawing strategy for priority schemes

Hyderabad: On the eve of completing 2.5 years of its five-year term, the TRS government is working out ways to expedite execution of its development programmes, while trying to keep expenditure at a bare minimum.

Senior IAS officials and five advisers to the TRS government have been asked to prepare “strategy papers” on each sector on how to minimise the impact of demonetisation on key sectors.

These strategy papers will be reflected in the new Budget (2017-18) to be presented in February. Thanks to Centre’s demonetisation announcement on November 8, tax revenues in TS have plummeted by over 50 per cent this month due to as business transactions have been kept on hold on account of currency crunch.

As of now, the TS government is unsure when the situation would improve or whether the Centre would compensate for the revenue loss caused to the state due to demonetisation.

In this scenario, Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao has decided to rope in government advisers and senior IAS officers to draft the strategy papers recommending measures on how to achieve the maximum results by utilising the limited financial resources and get closer to people besides checking the Opposition.

Mr Rao, who spent most of his first half-term planning the schemes, is focussing on execution of the plans in the second half of his term.

“The CM has asked government advisers and senior IAS officers to reprioritise the programmes and targets and recommend measures over how to achieve maximum targets with limited financial resources. They were asked to identify priority schemes sector-wise which can be directly beneficial to people at the ground-level and can be executed with lower spending,” said CMO sources.