AP Assembly Adjourns Sine Die, 9 Bills Passed

The ruckus of opposition Telugu Desam continued on the fourth day on Thursday, following which Assembly Speaker Thammineni Sitaram closed the session.

The Assembly started with a 15-minute delay due to absence of quorum. The TD legislators alleged that the YSRC government was showing negligence in conducting the assembly proceedings in a disciplined manner. The ruling party MLAs’ large-scale absence was proof of this, they said.

They said, “There are a lot of public issues, but the government is failing to discuss and resolve them through the assembly sessions. They moved an adjournment motion to discuss the “failures” of the government in implementing the job calendar. The plea for adjournment was turned down by the Speaker.

Angered by this, the TD legislators rushed to the well and to the speaker’s podium, raised slogans like “Bye-bye Jagan”. The speaker and ruling party legislators urged the TD MLA to cooperate for the smooth running of the house, but in vain.

Amidst the ruckus, the minister tabled an amendment to the AP Electricity Regulatory Commission bill, as also other papers. The speaker announced a break to control the situation.

Rajendranath Reddy, reacting to the criticism of the budget by TD leaders, questioned how TD could term the vote-on-account budget as useless when the majority of the allocations were for the people and their welfare?

The minister maintained that the budget allocated funds for various welfare schemes. “The opposition leaders are misleading the people on AP’s debts,” he said, adding that the government borrowed money only as per the limits prescribed under the Fiscal Responsibility and Budget Management Act (FRBM) and took other permits too.

Reacting to the allegations of hiding information related to loans taken by the government through corporations, Rajendranath said the TD never placed the reports of many corporations in the house. The YSRC government presented the loan details of corporations in the assembly,” he stated.

He said the TD government failed to implement the election manifesto for the 2014-19 term and ignored the promise to waive farm loans and loans taken by Self-Help Group members. The minister alleged that TD chief Nara Chandrababu Naidu, as the then CM, failed to give zero-interest loans as promised to farmers. Naidu promised a payment of `5,000 crore to the Kapu community but released only `1,500 crore instead, he added.

The finance minister stressed that the debts accrued by the YSRC government were less compared to the TD government. YSRC members welcomed the budget and expressed their approval of the allocations.

The Speaker announced that the assembly worked for 10.02 hours in three days, during which a total of 10 Bills were introduced and passed and 20 members spoke.

At the start, the ministers and MLAs wished Speaker Sitaram on the occasion of his birthday.