Telugu Desam Party president and Andhra Pradesh chief minister N Chandrababu Naidu might be blindly imitating his Telangana counterpart K Chandrasekhar Rao in launching and implementing various populist and developmental schemes.
But in one aspect, Naidu has decided not to follow KCR so blindly. It is with regard to delimitation of districts.
In Telangana, KCR had gone ahead with increase in the number of districts from 10 to 31 without following any reason or rationale.
As a result, his government had to appoint a large number of IAS and IPS officers, besides reshuffling of district administration.
While the administrative expenditure shot up, there have not been many benefits to the people as such, except convenience in approaching the collectors.
However, the Andhra Pradesh chief minister has decided against dividing the existing 13 districts, though there was a similar demand from his party men in his state.
While Telangana government could go ahead with it because it has resources, Naidu is not in a position afford such a huge expenditure.
Moreover, his focus is on Amaravati building and so, any disturbance in the districts at this stage might result in a severe political backlash.
“Instead of creating a chaos by reorganising the districts, we want to improve the administrative mechanism by introducing modern technology. We will focus on developing the economy at the grass root level and bring in transparency in administration. As such, there is no need for any delimitation,” revenue minister K E Krishnamurthy said.
