The Congress party has disputed the claims made by IT Minister K. Tarakarama Rao of Telangana registering an increase by 130% in the GSDP and 125% in the Per Capita Income and alleged that a factually incorrect report with distorted data was indirectly planted in leading newspapers in view of Chief Minister K. Chandrashekhar Rao’s visit to New Delhi.
Former Minister in Telangana Legislative Council Mohammed Ali Shabbir, in a media statement said that the Minister KTR shared a news clipping to make the false claim of growth in GSDP and PCI. Ideally, the minister should’ve shared the original report of the Union Ministry of Statistics & Program Implementation if he truly believed that there was some truth in those claims.
“TRS Govt got habitual of manipulating the budget figures to make fall claims of growth. In the Governor’s Address to Telangana Legislature on 14th March 2021, the TRS Govt claimed that the GSDP has increased by 114.71% in the last six years. Now the growth figure has been raised to 130%/. It will not be surprising if Chief Minister K. Chandrashekhar Rao claims that the GSDP has increased by 500% and Per Capita Income by 1,000% because he has no ability to differentiate between reality and illusion,” he said.
Shabbir Ali said that the Comptroller & Auditor General of India (CAG) and the 15th Finance Commission have clearly pointed out the serious auditing errors committed by the Telangana Government in the budget figures. They have accused the State Govt of inflating figures to show high revenues. Even the loans and borrowings were shown as State’s revenue. Therefore, he said that the present claim made by Minister KTR, even if it was based on the statistics of the Union Ministry of Statistics, was not reliable as it is based on manipulated data.
“TRS Govt claimed that Telangana’s Per Capita Income has increased from Rs. 1,24,104 in 2014 to Rs. 2,78,833 in 2021 registering a whopping increase by Rs.154,729 in the last seven years. He said this figure was too imaginative due to various factors. In a population of nearly 3.84 Crore, nearly 87.57 lakh families or nearly 2.86 crore people are beneficiaries of PDS rice.
The income criteria to get a ration card is Rs. 1.5 lakh in rural areas and Rs. 2 lakh in Urban. Therefore, none of these 2.86 crore people are having an annual income of Rs. 2,78,833. Further, there are 39,36,521 Aasra Pensioners of various categories with each surviving on Rs. 2,000 monthly pension given by the State Government.
