KTR bonhomie at media event

Hyderabad: TRS working president and state minister K.T. Rama Rao on Sunday said his party’s bond with students, employees, advocates and journalists remains strong.

Taking hundreds of journalists affiliated to the Telangana Union of Working Journalists down the memory lane at an interactive session here, Rama Rao said: “All of us had jointly struggled for separate statehood and achieved it at a time when other political parties dismissed Telangana as a dream.”

The TRS leader said, “Manandaridi pegu bandham” (tied with an umbilical cord), amidst loud cheering and clapping by the participants while recollecting the setting up of the Telangana Journalists Forum by a group led by Press Academy chairman Allam Narayana and journalist-turned-MLA Ch Kranti Kiran, a month after the launching of TRS. Both were present at Sunday’s event. The TJF later became TUWJ.

Rao reminded journalists that none of the four MPs of the BJP from the state had taken part in the struggle for statehood but were now criticising the architect of the new state, Chief Minister K. Chandrashekar Rao, in an “abusive language unmindful of his position and age”.

The irony, he said, was that the BJP leaders were questioning the state government over the Modi-led Centre “ditching” the state by not giving its nod for setting up the Information Technology Investment Region (ITIR), the educational institutes of excellence and the rail coach factory, for which requests had been made to the Centre by the state government. “You raise your voice against your Modi and Amit Shah,” he told the BJP parliamentarians.

On the contrary, Chandrashekar Rao had resolved the decades-long problem of fluorosis in districts like Nalgonda by ensuring safe drinking water to every household. “We doubled the number of government colleges in the state. Today, Telangana has become the rice bowl of the country just because of KCR’s vision to harness water resources.”

In a frank admission, the TRS working president said he doesn’t hesitate to or feel ashamed of seeking a vote in the coming MLC elections because “continuous support from people to a performing government is essential.” He took a dig at the BJP for “going overboard” in celebrating its victories in Dubbak and the GHMC polls. “It’s like the popular saying that dog biting man is no more a news and only man biting the dog makes headlines. We won all the other elections in the last six years,” he noted.

The minister promised that the state government would provide house or site to every journalist in the state within the next three years.

Allam Narayana said Telangana is the only state that would set up a corpus fund of Rs 100 crore for journalists’ welfare. TUWJ general secretaries Maruti Sagar and Ramana were also present.