HYDERABAD
The Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) has observed the hollowness in Chief Minister A. Revanth Reddy’s Davos investment claims.
Party leader and former minister Ponnala Lakshmaiah said the Chief Minister had claimed that they had secured investments worth ₹1.82 lakh crore. However, the Minister for IT and Industries D. Sridhar Babu said at the same press conference that it could be called a success only when the promised investments materialise.
As the Congress had come to power only in December 2023 and no policy changes were brought about since then, the credit would go mostly to the decisions taken by the previous government, he noted and added that there were only 194 IT companies in the State in 1997 and it had gone up beyond 1,500 in 2023.
Similarly, 3.27 lakh employees were on the rolls of IT firms till 2013 and by the end of 2023, it had gone up to 9.05 lakh. The number was only 12,000 in 1997. The built-up space occupied by IT firms in 1997 was just 2 lakh sqft and it was 7.5 crore sqft by the end of 2023. Besides, the IT innovations in Telangana were at 4% during the 2014-23 period, the highest in the country.
In a statement, another former minister T. Harish Rao sought to know whether the statement of the Chief Minister claiming that he had secured ₹1.82 lakh crore investment was correct or that of Deputy Chief Minister M. Bhatti Vikramarka who said that they were only Expressions of Interest (EoIs) and any investment has to materialise through proper processes.
