Nellore: Though he is a minister for the entire country, Nellore is always at the back of his mind for Union minister for urban development M. Venkaiah Naidu being a son of the soil.
He keeps track of the Central government funded projects suitable to Nellore and manages to obtain sanction whether he is a minister or not.
There are scores of schemes he brought for Nellore when he was Union minister for urban development for a brief tenure. This time also he is showering several Central schemes to develop the City and the district.
However it is learnt from sources in BJP that he is unhappy with the local ministers and administration for not taking follow up action to ground the sanctioned projects.
For instance a common facilities centre, a '10 crore project, under Ministry of Small and Medium Enterprise, which was sanctioned in January last year was shelved because land was not allotted in time.
After coming to know about this, Mr Naidu prevailed upon MSME and secured sanction once again to establish the project this year.
Similarly land was allotted to an indoor stadium against the rules in a place meant for public utility and this naturally led to delay in grounding the project.
BJP leaders alleged that the ruling party leaders are not effective in utilising the position of Mr Venkaiah Naidu even while he was openly hinting that there are many Central government programmes to develop the city and the district.
In fact, Mr Naidu sent several central teams at frequent intervals to study the requirements for Nellore and submit the proposals to the ministries concerned. He makes a point to announce new projects every time he visits Nellore and they are mostly based on the proposals prepared by his teams.
“What he expects is cooperation from the local leaders and officials to speed up clearances and allot land wherever required but they are not able to understand this” a senior BJP leader alleged.
