The Andhra Pradesh Cabinet on Wednesday congratulate Prime Minister Narendra Modi for his successful visit to the United States. The Cabinet, which met here under Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu, passed a resolution to this effect.
The meeting also decided that all the Ministers and top officials will participate in the cleanliness drive of Central Government ‘Swatch Bharat’ on Thursday.
In another resolution, the Cabinet demanded Bharat Ratna for Telugu Desam founder and former Chief Minister NT Rama Rao. In unusual move, the Cabinet also decided to set up a memorial trust for former Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao. Narasimha Rao, who hails from Telangana, was the only Telugu to become country’s Prime Minister.
The Cabinet urged the Central Government to build a memorial or Ghat in memory of Narasimha Rao. This was being as an attempt to embarrass the Congress leadership which had completely disowned its own former PM after his death and had forced his family to perform his last rite in Hyderabad.
Political observers say that there was a lot of symbolism in this attempt to adopt a Telangana political figure at a time when the Telangana Rashtra Samiti Government was trying to completely dissociate itself from the Andhra political figures.
At a time when the Telangana Government has decided to remove the statues of Andhra literary, the AP Cabinet decided to install the statues of Telangana figures in its proposed capital. The Cabinet disapproved the idea of Telangana Government to remove the status of Andhra leaders from Hyderabad.
The other decisions of the Cabinet meeting include setting up a corporation to deal with the issue of crop loan repayment. In the first phase the corporation will repay 20 per cent of the crop loans to Banks as part of the loan waiver scheme. The AP Government has also increased the dearness allowance of its employees by 6 per cent.