It is an open secret that TRS working president and state Information Technology minister KTR is a de facto chief minister of Telangana, for the simple reason that he is the son of CM KCR.
There have been several instances of KTR directly posing his nose into the activities of various ministries other than IT and industries, calling for official meetings and issuing orders. Even the party leaders have been openly describing him as the future CM of Telangana.
One thing KTR has never done so far was conducting a cabinet meeting, because it is the prerogative of the chief minister. But even that deficiency was resolved on Wednesday, when KTR headed a marathon eight-hour meeting of the council of ministers with a specific agenda and in the presence of all the officials.
While KCR was away in his farmhouse at Errvaelli, KTR held an impromptu meeting of all the ministers, though technically it is not called a cabinet meeting, at Pragati Bhavan to finalise the food processing and logistics policies in the state.
“As directed by Hon’ble CM KCR garu, presented the drafts of important sectors – Food Processing & Logistics policies to all the cabinet colleagues; 8-hour long discussion and lot of valuable inputs which will be incorporated for presentation to Cabinet soon,” KTR tweeted later.
This is for the first time in Telangana government that all the cabinet ministers had a meeting in the absence of the chief minister. The meeting was attended by Planning Board vice-chairman and officials.
It is very rare that the cabinet meetings are held without the presence of the chief ministers. In the combined Andhra Pradesh, the cabinet meetings were held only twice: once under the leadership of former home minister T Devender Goud, when Telugu Desam Party president and former chief minister N Chandrababu Naidu was injured in a land mine explosion by Maoists at Alipiri in October 2003.
The second such cabinet meeting was under the auspices of then finance minister K Rosaiah, after the death of former chief minister Y S Rajasekhar Reddy in a helicopter crash in September 2009.
Now with K T Rama Rao holding a cabinet meeting again in the absence of his father, the TRS supporters are saying that it is a clear indication of KTR succeeding his father sooner or later.