BJP to face polls alone: Venkaiah

Visakhapatnam, Mar 1 (UNI) Senior BJP leader M Venkaiah Naidu today said his party was quite sure that elections in Andhra Pradesh would be round the corner by October this year and they would face it without going for any alliance with the other parties.

Mr Naidu told the mediapersons that the BJP was prepared to face elections at any time.

Earlier, he also addressed the party cadres in the North Coastal Andhra Pradesh on the policies and strategies being adopted for the upcoming elections.

The main confrontation would be with the Congress which had lost six of the seven recent Assembly elections and managed a victory in Goa, he said.

Like the State Budget the Central Budget too was to lure the people as elections are ''very close''. The Budget has not addressed major issues like soaring prices of essential commodities and steps to control tax, he claimed.

With 72 per cent of farmers obtaining loans from private banks in the country and facing hardships, waiver of loans to the tune of Rs 60,000 crore in the new Budget is not sufficient to solve the problems faced by majority of the poor farmers, he added.

Mr Naidu said if the Government had wished the good of the farmers, it should have taken necessary steps to migrate loans taken by the farmers from private banks to the public sector banks.

The Centre has affected heavy cuts in the quantity of food grains distributed to the states and this has increased the burden on all the State Governments.

The Prime Minister has pointed out that by 2015 the country's grain production must reach 400 mn tonnes. However, the latest Budget has not taken care of this observation, Mr Naidu remarked.

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