Telugu Desam Party chief N Chandrababu Naidu with Finance Minister Arun Jaitley
When Telugu Desam Party chief N Chandrababu Naidu met Finance Minister Arun Jaitley in the capital today, he was promised full support on his wish list for the Seemandhra regions, which will form the residual Andhra Pradesh when the state of Telangana is born next week.
The Planning Commission, Mr Jaitley assured the 64-year-old TDP leader, is already looking into the proposal to grant the special category status to Seemandhra.
"After the division, there is a resource constraint which the successor state of Andhra Pradesh will suffer from, primarily because Hyderabad will be a part of Telangana. When the bifurcation bill was being passed in parliament in February, we had raised the issue of financially supporting Seemandhra," Mr Jaitley told reporters after meeting the TDP chief.
"Therefore, we are going to honour every bit of the issues we had raised at that time. We will support the state, because large parts of it has to be rebuilt large parts of it,'' the union finance minister added.
"There is no capital, no infrastructure, no institutions in Seemandhra. Mr Modi (Prime Minister) and the finance minister promised us to help build the state,'' concurred Mr Naidu.
When the Telangana statehood bill was passed in Parliament earlier this year, the Congress-led government had promised to accord the residual state with special category status for five years to offset losses it could suffer because of the state's bifurcation. The Seemandhra regions bitterly opposed the split and punished the Congress in general elections and state elections held simultaneously in Andhra Pradesh.
Mr Naidu is set to be the chief minister of the residual Andhra Pradesh. His TDP partnered the BJP in the elections. It won a majority in the assembly election with 108 out of 175 seats. The partners have also won 17 seats in the Lok Sabha. With 16 seats, the TDP is the BJP's second largest ally in Parliament.
The BJP had, during the discussion in Parliament on the Telangana bill, had demanded that the special category status for Seemandhra be extended to 10 years.