Andhra Pradesh Congress Committee president YS Sharmila on Tuesday said the Union Budget for fiscal 2024-25 made no mention of the special category status for the state and alleged that the BJP-led NDA government at the Centre has cheated it again.
The opposition YSRCP slammed the Centre and said it given a 'zero' to Andhra Pradesh in the Budget.
Sharmila highlighted that the NDA government promised to honour the commitments made in the Andhra Pradesh Reorganisation Act, 2014 but noted that it left the most important of it all- special category status (SCS).
"They (Centre) said they will honour bifurcation promises but there was no mention of SCS. Wasn't SCS the foremost of all. In Tirupati, (Narendra) Modi promised to give special status for 10 years," she said, addressing a press conference at the Congress office in Vijayawada.
Ridiculing the Rs 15,000 crore funds promised for Andhra Pradesh capital city as pittance, Sharmila said Bihar, ruled by NDA partner JD(U), with just 12 MPs managed to procure higher financial allocations of Rs 26,000 crore.
Urging Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu, who is leading the TDP-led government in the state to respond to these developments, she advised him to realise that the saffron party is allegedly deceiving Andhra Pradesh again.
Further, she wanted to know about Visakhapatnam railway zone not getting a mention and demanded that the port city and Vijayawada needed Metro Rail projects.
According to Sharmila, Andhra Pradesh has been repeatedly cheated over the past 10 years and called on Naidu to withdraw support to the BJP at the Centre.
Delving on the lack of timelines and financial specifics on some budget commitments to infrastructure, backwards areas and others, the Congress leader said that this was not a budget but a manifesto.
Meanwhile, the YS Jagan Mohan Reddy-led YSR Congress Party (YSRCP) alleged that the Central government had given "zero" to Andhra Pradesh in the Union Budget presented by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman.
In its official X account, the party said the Rs 15,000 crore funds for the capital Amaravati is nothing but a surety to be given by the Centre to get a loan.
"Yellow media and TDP have been making noise since morning saying that Rs 15,000 crore has been allocated to AP (Andhra Pradesh) in the Central government budget. But the Centre says it will give guarantee to AP to raise Rs 15,000 crore as a loan from various institutions," the YSRCP said in the post in Telugu.
The Centre will facilitate special financial support through multilateral development agencies for the development of Amaravati as the capital with Rs 15,000 crore being arranged in the current financial year and additional amounts in future, Sitharaman said in the budget.
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