BJP says KTR lying on Bayyaram steel plant assurance

Hyderabad: The BJP said on Tuesday that IT minister K.T. Rama Rao was lying about an ‘assurance’ from the Centre that it would set up a steel plant at Bayyaram, and declared that there was no such guarantee in the AP Reorganisation Act.

Senior BJP leader and Rajya Sabha member Dr K. Laxman told reporters that the bifurcation Act only talked about “examining the possibility of setting up a steel plant” in Khammam district. “KTR must explain what this means,” Dr Laxman said.

He said the BRS, currently chasing the prospect of state government buying the Visakhapatnam Steel Plant (VSP), should have focused on allowing industry to flourish in the state and generate employment.

Dr Laxman said that Chief Minister K. Chandrashekar Rao could have, among other things, given the go-ahead for uranium mining in Nalgonda district which would have created thousands of jobs.

“Despite large uranium deposits, KCR had said no to mining. In Pulivendula in Andhra Pradesh, the Uranium Corporation of India Limited is extracting the mineral. The KCR government should have convinced people about the importance of mining uranium. He does not take any such action but now talks about the VSP,” Dr Laxman told reporters.

He said the BRS and its leaders, instead of focusing on reviving industries, were after industrial land as in the case of Hindustan Machine Tools in Hyderabad.