Anti-incumbency not a factor in polls: Naidu

The Andhra Pradesh chief minister, N Chandrababu Naidu, said he was fully satisfied with the nine-year rule of the TDP in the state.

Refusing to buy the argument of anti-incumbency in the recently concluded elections, Naidu claimed that he did not come across a single instance where people had spoken against the state government in any one of his public meetings.

"Our government has addressed almost all the community needs in rural habitations. So there is no question of people becoming indifferent towards the TDP. The only thing that we could not fully redress were the individual grievances of people," Naidu said while addressing a media conference.

He said that only the MLAs and party leaders were responsible for the negative opinion against the TDP government at local levels.

"Even Congress MLAs are not above this local factor," he said. He argued that any resentment among the farmers existed only on account of the continuous drought conditions and the lack of water in projects and not because of the TDP government's negligence.

Hoping to form the next government in the state, the TDP supremo pointed out that his government had taken up both long term and short term measures for the welfare and development of the people.

He blamed the other parties (Congress and TRS) for bringing temporary issues and impractical promises like free power and the issue of separate statehood for Telangana.

Naidu reiterated his demand for a national level debate on allowing exit polls. But he did not comment on prepoll surveys, which mainly favoured TDP in the state.

Though Naidu agreed that there were problems in his party, he denied any plan to effect any serious changes.

"We have undertaken a constituency wise review of various aspects in terms of performance of cadre and leaders so that we could match the election results with our reports. We need to reorient the party, which does not mean any large scale purging as newspapers interpret," he pointed out.

Naidu justified the imposition of fuel surcharge on power consumers saying that it should not be mixed with the hike in power tariff.

"The Andhra Pradesh Electricity Regulatory Commission (Aperc) has recently allowed APTransco to transfer the burden of about Rs 230 crore, which is said to have accrued in 2003-04 on account of increase in variable cost (mainly fuel cost) of power, on the consumers," he said.

The chief minister argued that the government was accountable only for the annual tariff fixation where the question of subsidy by the government came in, but not the fuel surcharge adjustment (FSA) which, according to him, is automatically done.

Interestingly, though the Aperc had allowed the power utility to impose a fuel surcharge with regard to the first quarter of 2003-04 of about Rs 50 crore on consumers, APTransco did not hike the surcharge in view of the elections. The final order from the Aperc for the entire amount of fuel surcharge came only towards the end of elections.