Hyderabad to become safer, smarter, slum-free

The Telangana government aims to make Hyderabad a safer, smarter and slum-free city and in its maiden budget presented on Wednesday made allocations for various components of this goal.

Finance Minister E. Rajender in his budget speech in the assembly said the first and foremost priority is to make the city safe and crime-free.

The government has already released Rs.350 crore for building a rapid response system capable of reaching any trouble spot within a maximum time of 10 minutes in twin cities of Hyderabad and Secunderabad.

He allocated Rs.70 crore for installation of CCTV surveillance systems in Hyderabad and Cyberabad police Commissionerates. Another Rs.20 crore have been proposed in 2014-15 budget to make the police stations citizen friendly.

The minister proposed Rs.31.41 crore for technology backbone for citizen centric traffic management and for fighting organized crime. For the construction of barracks and camping centres, Rs.45 crore has been proposed for the Cyberabad Commissionerate.

The budget proposed Rs.250 crore for Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) for taking up slum-free city programme. The government will provide Rs.416 crore as loans to Hyderabad Metro Rail. It allocated Rs.581 crore for improvement of water supply in slum areas of Hyderabad and for Krishna and Godavari water supply schemes and sewerage Improvement.

The government allocated Rs.90 crore for Hyderabad Information Technology and Investment Region (ITIR). Stating that Hyderabad with its metropolitan culture and a  salubrious climate is already on the radar of global investors, the finance minister said there is an imperative to invest in the improvement of infrastructure in Hyderabad to retain its attractiveness.

Voicing concern over lack of momentum in the growth of industry sector, the minister said there was negative growth of industry sector in Telangana by 0.9 percent in 2012-13. Though growth marginally picked up to 2.7 percent in 2013-14, it remains much below the desired level. He said the assembly that the government is in the process of unveiling most attractive, effective and investor-friendly industrial policy.

A chasing cell will be established with the task of monitoring industrial approvals on day-to-day basis. It is proposed to establish a land bank with about five lakh acres of government land suitable for location of industries. Telangana State Industrial Infrastructure Corporation (TSIIC) will provide water and electricity in this land. For this an amount of Rs.100 crore is proposed in the budget.

Rajender noted that the growth of the state economy witnessed a sharp fall from an average of 10.5 percent during 2005-10 to 4.5 percent in 2012-13 owing to marked deceleration in the growth of industrial sector.

The major contributors to the Gross State Domestic Product (GSDP) are the services and the industry sectors contributing about 58 and 28 percent, respectively. The agriculture sector though contributes only 14 percent to the GSDP supports nearly 50 percent of the State's population either directly or indirectly.

-IANS