Hyderabad: Andhra Pradesh politics may turn bitter with Chief Minister Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy setting up a special investigating agency (SIT) headed by a Deputy Inspector General (DIG rank police officer to probe all financial dealings by the previous Chandrababu Naidu-led TDP government from 2014 June to 2019 April. TDP dubbed the move as nothing but political vendetta by the CM. In a late night Government Order (GO No 344) on Friday, the Andhra Pradesh government constituted the SIT to go into all controversial financial dealings in all departments of the previous government. The SIT has been given powers to proceed further against the guilty under the provisions of the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC). Not just that, the SIT can also function as a police station through a notification under CrPC to summon anyone or record their statement or issue search warrants and arrest anyone, if necessary. The tone and contents of this Government Order shows that Jagan’s government is keen on filing criminal cases against those in the previous government. The SIT is headed by Intelligence Wing DIG Kolli Raghurami Reddy and consists of Visakhapatnam SP A Babuji, Intelligence Wing SP Ch. Venkata Appala Naidu, additional SP Srinivas Reddy and two DSPs and three inspectors. The Government Order said that the SIT would go into the transactions of all government departments, all corporations and special purpose vehicles and joint ventures set up by the previous government and all major decision, including some major schemes with financial implications. The SIT is constituted based on the report of a Cabinet sub-committee headed by Finance Minister Buggana Rajendranath Reddy which found that there were several irregularities in several departments during the TDP period. They include the land pooling scheme for Amaravati capital city project to Polavaram irrigation project and Power Purchase Agreements. The government has accepted the report and initiated steps like reverse tendering process in all major irrigation projects, including Poolavaram, and claimed that it had saved around Rs 1,000 crore to the exchequer. The new government cancelled around 85 PPAs as they were found to be charging higher tariff from the discoms.
The decision to go for a SIT comes in the wake of detection of several scams in different departments in the last few months. For example, the government found a scam in the procurement of surveillance equipment in the home department and placed an additional DG rank IPS official A.B. Venkateswara Rao under suspension. This week, another scam was unearthed in the labour department relating to purchase of equipment for the ESI hospitals during the regime of TDP.
However, Opposition TDP cried foul at the setting up of the SIT and said that it was aimed at targeting former CM Chandrababu Naidu and his son Lokesh. “This is for the first time in the country that a government has set up a police SIT to probe all transactions of the previous government at the political level. This is pure political vendetta,” TDP’s spokesman and former MLA Bonda Uma Maheshwar Rao said. TDP suspects that the powers granted to the SIT to function as a police station and inspect any file in any department without any formal complaint was unprecedented and that it was meant to frame charges against all former TDP ministers. “The government wants to scare us away from raising pubic issues and fighting for the interests of Amaravati farmers,” Rao said.