Telangana CM urges Modi to go for 'total cleanup'

Hyderabad, Dec 16  Reiterating his support for demonetisation, Telangana Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao on Friday appealed to Prime Minister Narendra Modi to go for 'total a cleanup'.

Rao said the Centre should initiate many more steps towards elimination of all forms of black money like diamonds, gold, shares and foreign currency and black money generation through crony capitalism.

The Chief Minister was replying to a debate on demonetisation in the state assembly.

"The flow of black money into the country through money laundering from British Virgin Islands, Mauritius and Singapore should be regulated effectively," he said

KCR, as Rao is popularly known, hoped that the central government would go for political cleanup and introduce state funding of election campaign.

Stating that the state has no option but to follow the decision taken by the central government, KCR said the scrapping of high value notes has had some impact on the state's revenues.

Admitting that people were also facing difficulties, he hoped this would be temporary as the Prime Minister had sought 50 days to ease the hardship.

The Chief Minister, who met Modi last month, told the assembly that the state government was in touch with the Centre and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and seeking supply of currency notes in small denominations to minimise people's the hardships.

According to RBI, so far Rs 19,109 crore cash has been supplied to the state while Rs 57,479 crore was deposited by people in the banks.

KCR said the government had taken initiatives to encourage people for cashless transactions.

"The assessments made by the central government institutions indicate that Telangana stands first in the country in terms of number of cashless transactions," he said.

Earlier, barring the BJP, all opposition parties in the house criticised the manner in which the Centre had scrapped the high-value notes.

Leader of Opposition K. Jana Reddy spoke about the hardships faced by people.

At one point, the Chief Minister intervened in the debate to advise the Congress leader to avoid using harsh words in criticising the Centre or the Prime Minister.