Times
of India: Hyderabad: Thursday, 17 September 2015.
The Telangana
government has borrowed a whopping Rs 51,000 crore from various funding
agencies in the first 15 months of the Telangana Rashtra Samithi rule in the
state. It is looking for additional loans from the likes of the World Bank to
the tune of Rs 10,000 crore for various infrastructure projects that it wants
to take up.
The
revelation of the extent of borrowing by the TRS led government since June
2014, when the present government came to power, came in a reply to a Right to
Information Act application filed by the Forum for Good Governance.
Releasing the
data it received in reply to its RTI request, the Forum said that the Rs 51,000
crore loans in the pipeline, part of which have been availed, were in addition
to Telangana's share of the Rs 1.8 lakh crore outstanding loans of the united
Andhra Pradesh government, whose final division between the successor Telangana
and Andhra Pradesh governments is yet to be finalized.
The forum
secretary M Padmanabha Reddy expressing concern at the rate of borrowings
sought so far by the Telangana government, said that the new loans would add to
the Rs 70,000 crore or so of handed down burden of the outstanding united AP
loans that Telangana will eventually have to repay.
The
government has so far, obtained Rs 23,000 crore from sale of bonds at 9%
interest, got a loan of Rs 24,000 crore from the Rural Electrification
Corporation at 11% interest, and Rs 4000 crore from the Power Finance
Corporation.
In addition,
it is in negotiations with the World Bank for a Rs 10,000 crore loan at 3.3%
interest, he said.
Padmanabha
Reddy said that it was disconcerting that while chief minister K Chandrasekhar
Rao repeatedly says that Telangana is a revenue surplus state, it needs to line
up borrowings on such a scale. He further said it was because the Telangana
government has exhausted its borrowing limits that the chief minister has been
seeking relaxation of borrowing limits set on the state by writing to the NITI
Ayog.
The Forum, he
said, believed that the state government is relying on borrowings due to
"lack of financial discipline and spending on unimportant items leading to
sudden raise in non-plan expenditure."
"We are
not against borrowing loans for development works but wasting the state
finances on unproductive expenditure and going for loans for developmental
works is not justified," Padmanabha Reddy said, adding "the
government must take people into confidence on its plans for repaying the loans
and how it plans to pay the annual interest on the loans."
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