Hyderabad got Fab City due to my efforts: Naidu

Hyderabad, Feb. 10: Telugu Desam president N. Chandrababu Naidu on Friday claimed credit for SemIndia choosing the city to set up its $3billion Fab City, inviting a furious reply from the Congress. Mr Naidu said the achievement was the result of his efforts to improve infrastructure and place the city on the international map. “We had taken several initiatives because of which investors are coming in now,” he said.
Mr Naidu said his government had allotted 5,000 acres of land to the international airport at Shamshabad and 5,000 acres for a hardware park in its vicinity. These factors played a vital role in SemIndia’s decision, he said. Asked about Mr Naidu’s claim, State finance minister K. Rosaiah said he would not deny credit to Mr Naidu if the TD government’s measures had helped in bringing the mega project.
“We will certainly appreciate any initiative taken by the previous government in bringing projects to State. They (TD) may have taken the initiative, but it materialised only under the leadership of Chief Minister Y.S. Rajasekhar Reddy. Ultimately, we are doing the ribbon cutting,” he said with a chuckle. He added, “(Union IT minister) Mr Dayanidi Maran clearly admitted that the project had come to Hyderabad because of pro-active initiatives of the government.
This was possible because of the fiscal management during the last 20 months,” he said. “We have not availed of the ways and means advances from the Reserve Bank of India even for one day,” Mr Rosaiah said. He said the TD government had conducted several partnership summits and had gone to the Davos Summit in Switzerland on six occasions to attract investment.
“We all know what happened to those MoUs signed year after year with great fanfare for thousands of crores of rupees. None of the projects materialised. The total industrial investments between 1994-2004 was Rs 13,024 crore, and between 1999-2004 Rs 5,685 crore,” he said. Not a single public sector unit had come to the State during Mr Naidu’s tenure, he said. Even the LNG project in Kakinada had moved out.