Hyderabad ‘to become biggest city in India’

Hyderabad: The ambitious and grand vision of Chief Minister K. Chandrashekhar Rao for Telangana state includes, apart from many other things, two more airports for Hyderabad.

He presented his vision at “Re-inventing Telangana”, a brain storming session with the ministers, advisors to the government and the government officials from across the state.

KCR told the meeting that with IT Investment Region (ITIR) coming up in the city, the population of Hyderabad will increase rapidly reaching 35 million in three to five years from present 9.4 million and one airport will not be sufficient. He suggested building two more airports one at Shamirpet in the northern part and at Ghaktesar in the east of Hyderabad.

Hyderabad at present has a world class private sector international airport planned in a way to meet the requirements of next three decades. Apart from that the old Begumpet airport was also lying unused.

KCR’s vision also envisages a rapid transport system, which will enable the people from any part of the state to reach Hyderabad in 21 minutes. “This will discourage migration of people in surrounding areas”, he said. Hyderabad, he said will be a growth engine and become the biggest city in the country in sixe and population and the government will have to take measures to meet the needs of the people.

His two and a half hour long address at the meeting covered all the aspects of the administration ranging from irrigation and agriculture to rural and urban development, power and housing.

He said that the illegal constructions had become a curse for Hyderabad as it had destroyed many lakes. He asked the officials to initiate measures to regularize the 58000 illegal constructions in Hyderabad and also address the same problem in other districts of the state.

He smelled a rat in the housing schemes and pointed out that in many cases records show that houses were built and funds were released but they did not reach the beneficiaries. He said that 5.5 million houses were sanctioned and 4 million were built. He asked the officials to unearth the scam and take action against the culprits.

In the public distribution system he said the biggest anomaly was the number of ration cards. “The state has only 8.4 million households but here are 10.07 million ration cards”, he said asking the officials to take action to weed out the bogus cards. He said these excess cards were being used to siphon out the rice and other essential commodities.

To make agriculture beneficial for the farmers, he announced that a program wll be launched for the soil testing in the stat and crop colonies will be developed. On the power front he said that state needs more 6000 MW power generation capacity to tide over the crisis.