Hyderabad: A ‘confident’ Revenue and Housing Minister Ponguleti Srinivasa Reddy, on Wednesday, May 27, declared that he would not contest the next Assembly Elections in Telangana if the government failed to construct more Indiramma houses than the previous Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) regime.

His challenge came in response to BRS Working President KT Rama Rao’s (KTR) recent allegations that the Congress government failed to construct a single house for the poor in Hyderabad.

On Wednesday, Reddy inspected Malakpet, Gaddiannaram, Nampally and Bahadurpura areas to check the feasibility of constructing 1 lakh Indiramma Houses inside the Outer-Ring Road’s (ORR) limits as announced during the recent cabinet meeting.

Addressing the media at Dr BR Ambedkar Telangana State Secretariat after the inspection, Ponguleti said that there were 39 locations inside the ORR where land parcels measuring anywhere between 1,000 square yard to 25 acres were available.

He said the 1 lakh Indiramma houses within the ORR limits will be built on an in-situ development basis. “We are going to construct Indiramma houses at the very location where the poor people are residing, because we don’t want to disturb the livelihood of the poor by constructing houses some 30 km away like the BRS government did,” Ponguleti said.

He alleged that only 46,000 houses were constructed in and around Hyderabad under the ten-year BRS rule, while 21,000 houses were left incomplete. “There are no basic facilities like electricity, water and sanitation. Out of these, 16,000 houses were being re-allotted because people did not want them,” he claimed.

Ponguleti said that in the second phase of Indiramma houses in the rural areas which will be launched from June 1, another 2.5 lakh houses will be constructed across the state, with each constituency being allotted 2,000 houses.

By the end of first and second phases combined, he said there would be 5,500 to 7,000 Indiramma houses that would have been constructed in each constituency in the rural areas.