Andhra Pradesh chief minister Chandrababu Naidu seems to have some lurking respect for his Telangana counterpart K Chandrasekhar Rao, despite political hostility.
Many a time Naidu took cue from KCR’s initiatives and of course, he has the ability to present the modified scheme as first of its kind as he claims in the case of river liking. A couple of days ago Naidu asked the RTC officials to partition the buses for the benefit of women commuters. Whether this is good or bad is a different matter, this is the idea taken directly from Telangana government.
Telangana government, based on a report submitted by a woman IAS officer, divided the city buses in to two parts, one for women and the other for men. Now Naidu has decided to implement in Andhra. The buses will be partitioned from May 1, 2016. In the first phase 711 buses will have women cabins. The idea of women cabins looks incongruous because in AP because on one side Naidu’s government developing apps for welfare schemes to give people access to the scheme from a mobile phone- a modern trend, on the other he wants partition in buses, a medieval idea in the IT era, where men and women work together in lakhs. What required is not the partition, openness- with cultural education. Ok, this is a different issue.
Naidu thought this was good and aped Telangana. Let’s have a look at what Naidu borrowed from his counterpart since the division of the state.
Of all the ideas Naidu borrowed from KCR two stand out as hilarious. First, under pressure from Telangana government Naidu also announced a salary hike for government employees after KCR did it. KCR agreed for 43 per cent and Naidu also pegged the hike at 43 per cent. Second, engineering defection in the opposition party. KCR has almost eliminated TDP from Assembly. Now Naidu experimenting with the idea in AP.Few more cases where Naidu imitated KCR:
When Telangana CM announced Amitabh Bachchan as the brand ambassador of the state, no to lag behind Naidu immediately declared that Amitabh was state’s health ambassador. Next comes the water grid. After KCR announced the massive water grid project to address the acute water scarcity across the state, Naidu said he was also planning a water grid and assured water to every village in the state. Introduction of “she autos” and ” she teams” is another area where KCR showed the way to Naidu. The Andhra CM was extremely critical of socio-economic survey of Chandrasekhar Rao last year and took up the matter with the centre also. But, he is replicating the experiment in Amaravati now.
