<b>Selling voters on reform</b>
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<b>Selling voters on reform</b>

Headline: Selling voters on reform
Source: Euromoney
Date: September 2000
Author: Kala Rao

In the plush VIP waiting room outside the chief minister’s office in Hyderabad, a group of Japanese businessmen wait patiently for an audience with Chandrababu Naidu. In halting English, one of them explains to a local bureaucrat that Japan desperately needs 10,000 software engineers from India. Naidu is scheduled to visit that country in October, the bureaucrat tells them. After a brief audience, the businessmen are bundled into a large auditorium to watch an e-government at work – a weekly video-conference that Naidu hosts with collectors from all over the state.

Naidu seems more like a sovereign head of state than the head of a somewhat backward province in southern India, Andhra Pradesh. Many believe that he bypasses Delhi by lobbying rich, well-connected Andhraites in America. The first loans that were cleared by the World Bank months after the US imposed economic sanctions on India in May 1998, went to his state. US president Bill Clinton was persuaded to stop by at Hyderabad on his visit to India last March, even though many expected him to go to Bangalore.

But Naidu’s crowning moment came last year when he got re-elected in the state elections with a mandate that allows him to push ahead with reforms and provides a useful lever with which to mould policies of the government in Delhi.








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