Hyderabad, July 3: What’s ticking for the babus of Andhra Pradesh? Politics, of course.

And before you say ‘what’s new’, it’s the do-good bug that has bitten them ? one a former IAS officer and the other still in service.

Their aim: eradicate poverty and cleanse the system of corruption. And the only way they can do that, they say, is by floating political parties.

One of them, Dr Jayaprakash Narayan, the convener of the Lok Satta, an administration watchdog, and known for his views against the reform-driven regime of N. Chandrababu Naidu, is a campaigner against corruption in public life.

He was special secretary to N.T. Rama Rao and quit the IAS in a huff after Naidu toppled NTR. After years of being a sort of ombudsman on administration and public life of elected representatives, he has turned to full-time politics.

Narayan has the backing of the strong Kamma community. He is also the blue-eyed boy of Enaadu patriarch Ramoji Rao, whose publicity organs ? ETV2, ETV and Enaadu newspaper ? would surely rally round him.

The other IAS officer is Jatish Chandra Mohanty. The 1979-batch officer is going back to his native land with a mission. “I have to do something for mo Odisha (our Orissa),” he says. “In my state, 40 per cent of the population live below the poverty line and almost 50 per cent are illiterate. All the political forces are exploiting these factors to their advantage.”

Mohanty has been discussing his plans and strategies with like-minded former bureaucrats and also social scientists in Orissa. “What they need is a leader, in whom people have confidence.”

This is not the first time that bureaucrats in Andhra have chosen a path of politics. Former director-general of police M.V. Bhaskar Rao floated a political outfit but it failed to attract people. Another senior policemen, Malakondayya, joined the BJP and contested several elections from Nellore.

P.S. Rammohan Rao, another police officer, did not join any political party but was the BJP’s choice to become governor in Tamil Nadu.

Another former IAS officer, A.V.S. Reddy, had floated the concept of a Bharata Desam party in the early eighties even before NTR conceived the Telugu Desam Party. Reddy, who became a household name in Krishna district, later had dropped the idea. After retiring as director-general of the National Institute of Rural Development, he is now a state election commissioner.