Telangana Industry Minister KT Rama Rao on Sunday threw a challenge at Prime Minister Narendra Modi to name a state with better all-round performance than Telangana for the past nine years while ruing that the latter refused to acknowledge the performing state for petty politics.

A day after Narendra Modi alleged that Central government projects in the state were being delayed because of lack of cooperation from the state government, Rao hit back at Modi by tweeting a list of achievements of the state. Despite being the youngest state in the country Telangana has the highest per capita growth and it is among the top four contributing states to Indian GDP.

“Yet the prime minister of India has not had a single word of appreciation!! Refuses to acknowledge a performing state for petty politics,” lamented the industry minister before daring the prime minister “to name a state that has performed better all round than Telangana in the last 9 years”.

In his list of state’s achievements, the BRS working president named Telangana the first state to provide drinking water to all households completed the world’s largest lift irrigation project and had the best rural development model in the country with 100 per cent open defecation-free villages.

In addition, Telangana was the second highest paddy producer in the country and the creator of the highest number of jobs in the IT sector. The state with the highest green cover growth of 7.7 per cent in the country also won the second highest number of awards (26) for municipalities. It was among the top 3 ranked states when it comes to ease of doing business with the best industrial policy in the country.

Moreover, when it comes to industrialisation, the state was home to the largest textile park and the vaccine hub of the world. The state with the highest per capita power consumption and Telangana ranked second as the producer of renewable energy in the country. According to the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) Telangana was found to be the state with the lowest corruption in India while Mercer rated Hyderabad as the best Indian city five times in a row.

Yesterday, the prime minister slammed the BR’s supremo and Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao without naming him for promoting the interest of his family ahead of the state and corruption saying funds meant for the poor are being siphoned off and used to feed the ecosystem. The chief minister and his Cabinet ministers despite being invited to the programme of the Prime Minister chose to skip it, raising the hackles of the BJP’s state leadership.

Meanwhile, BJP chief Bandi Sanjay Kumar posted a photograph of himself holding a shawl and wrote “Beautiful handloom shawl would have looked even better on chief minister KCR if he had attended the meeting at Parade grounds yesterday.”

In the background, there was a photograph of a triumphant Bandi Sanjay greeting the Prime Minister at Begumpet airport. He had been released from jail after being granted conditional bail just a day ahead of the Prime Minister’s visit.