It was only last Monday that Union finance minister Nirmala Sitaraman declared in Lok Sabha that the Y S Jagan Mohan Reddy government in Andhra Pradesh had taken only Rs 1.77 lakh crore loans from various sources in the last four years.
She even indicated that the previous TDP government had taken loans amounting to Rs 2,64,451 crore between 2014 and 2019 and the total outstanding loans went up to Rs 4,42,442 crore between 2019 and 2023.
"The outstanding debts of Andhra Pradesh by March 2019 were Rs 2,64,451 crore. It went up to Rs 3,07,672 crore in 2019-20, Rs 3,53,021 crore in 2020-21; Rs 3,93,718 crore in 2021=22 and Rs 4,42,442 crore in 2022-23,” she said.
However, Nirmala’s statement was not taken kindly by her own party leader and former Union minister Daggubati Purandeshwari, who recently took charge as the president of Andhra Pradesh unit of Bharatiya Janata Party.
She came out with her own statistics on the outstanding loans of the state.
On Friday, Purandeshwari lodged a complaint with Nirmala herself, saying the Jagan Mohan Reddy government had indulged in indiscriminate borrowings, pushing the state into a debt trap and imposing heavy burden on the people of the state.
According to her, the outstanding loans of Andhra Pradesh were Rs 97,000 crore at the time of bifurcation of combined state. Between 2014 and 2019, the loans went up to Rs 3,62,375 crore – which means, the TDP government had taken loans to the tune of Rs 2,65,375 crore in five years.
This figure more or less matches the numbers quoted by the finance minister in her statement. But Purandeshwari says the outstanding loans went up to Rs 10,77,000 crore by 2022-23.
“It means, the Jagan government has borrowed Rs 7,14,625 crore in the last four years,” she said, pointing out that the figure of Rs 1.77 lakh crore quoted by Nirmala in Lok Sabha was wrong.
She also demanded that the Jagan government should account for diversion of loans and grants given by the Centre to various populist schemes.
