Telangana Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao on Thursday, 31 July, asked his officials to prepare a plan to build a film city in 2,000 acres of land in and around Hyderabad. He expects the new film city to be on the lines of Hollywood.
The main aim of building such a facility is to arrest migration of film makers from Hyderabad to other cities and states, the Chief Minister stated at a high-level industrial review meeting at the State's Secretariat.
Media and business baron Ramoji Raoh has already built Ramoji Film City in Hyderabad, which has production facilities for films and television serials. Both south Indian and Bollywood film makers come here for shooting and other production activity.
Responding to the speculations that Hyderabad-centric Tollywood would shift to other cities and states in the wake of Telangana State formation, KCR has announced this film city project.
KCR asserted that film industry would remain in Hyderabad and he wanted to improve the infrastructure to develop it further. All facilities on par with Hollywood would be provided in the proposed Cinema City, the Chief Minister said.
KCR govt eyes TTD land:
Media reports also said that the KCR government is said to be taking back a five-acre land in Hyderabad from the possession of Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams (TTD), the body that manages Lord Venkateswara temple in Tirumala hills.
The land in the possession of TTD is said to have been granted by the State government when Anjaiah was the chief minister. KCR government is concentrating on reclamation of encroached government lands in the state capital.
As per information available, the five-acre land in Survery Number 403 was actually given to build a Ganesha temple by the government. Since the government failed to allot funds to build the Ganesh temple over the years, the land was given away to TTD in 2006.
While TTD initially proposed to build both Ganesha and Balaji/Venkateswara temples, neither was constructed and now some of that land has been encroached into by land grabbers.
After noticing the encroachment in the five-acres, TTD had recently earmarked ₹28 crore to build the two temples and submitted the file to the government during Telangana movement.
Now the file has reached KCR, who is said to be mulling over retraction of the entire land from TTD's possession.
