Telangana Govt Under Fire Over Unpaid Secretariat Drinking Water Bills!

Telangana Chief Minister Revanth Reddy’s words may cross forts, but the situation on the ground is completely different. CM Revanth Reddy has repeatedly said on public platforms that Telangana’s competition is not with neighbouring states, but with places like Japan, Singapore, Tokyo and New York in the United States. On the one hand, the government is struggling even to provide legally due benefits to retired government employees. Thousands of retired employees have had to approach the Telangana High Court and obtain orders before they could receive their retirement benefits. At a time like this, reports have prominently appeared in the media that the water supply was stopped at the Secretariat, the administrative headquarters of the state, because bills were allegedly not paid to those supplying drinking water. According to the government’s budget figures, there are hundreds of thousands of crores of rupees. But a discussion is now underway over whether the Telangana government has reached a situation where it cannot even pay the bills of those supplying drinking water to employees working at the Secretariat, let alone meet the basic needs of the people.

                                             What could be more embarrassing for the government than this? The amount is reportedly just Rs 50 lakh. There have been allegations for a long time that no bill gets cleared in the Telangana government unless commissions are paid. Has the bill for the drinking water suppliers also been held up for the same reason? Or does the Telangana government not even have Rs 50 lakh to pay those supplying water to the Secretariat? This debate has now come to the fore. Officials say that both under the previous BRS government and now, instead of taking credit for the investments made by private companies, the government’s own initiatives have remained limited. At the same time, it is said that large amounts of incentives that are supposed to be given to industrial companies are also pending.

                                                  Another strange aspect is that, regardless of who is in power, they construct large buildings and allegedly take their respective commissions, while no one is paying attention even to basic maintenance at the newly constructed integrated collectorate offices in several districts across Telangana. Officials say that although huge buildings have been constructed, the lack of allocation of funds for their maintenance has now become a major problem. The fact that bills for drinking water supplied to the Secretariat were not paid, and that the issue received prominent coverage in the media, has led to comments that this reflects the way administration is being carried out in the state.