HYDERABAD: Despite chief minister Chandrababu Naidu’s repeated appeals to his colleagues to be more visible on social media, several of them are still unable to use social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook to establish a connection with netizens. Except irrigation minister Devineni Uma Maheswara Rao and human resources development minister Ganta Srinivasa Rao, ministers are just not active on social media platforms.
Ironically, among the social media laggards is information technology minister Palle Raghunatha Reddy. He lags way behind his Telangana counterpart K T Rama Rao, who is a regular on Twitter and an active advocate of governance through social media.
Raghunatha Reddy does have a Twitter account (@palleraghu) though. But he has so far tweeted just four times in the past two years, while K T Ramarao interacts with people through Twitter almost every day. Raghunatha Reddy’s first tweet was posted on 10 September 2014 to recall the historic speech delivered by Swami Vivekananda in Chicago in 1893. His last tweet was on 17 September 2014, posted to convey birthday greetings to Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Even some of the younger ministers in the Chandrababu Naidu cabinet, such as Ravela Kishore Babu, Peethala Sujatha and Kollu Ravindra, are not seen on the social media, leave alone veterans such as deputy chief minister K E Krishnamurthy and finance minister Yanamala Ramakrishnudu.
In fact, at every Cabinet meeting, the chief minister implores his colleagues to make themselves be more visible on social networking sites. He also makes it a point to tell his colleagues that while appraising their performance, he would lay considerable emphasis on their social media use. Naidu himself is very active on Facebook and Twitter.