Insurance cover attracts many to take TRS membership

Hyderabad: The insurance cover for Rs 2 lakh is attracting the masses to take the membership of Telangana Rashtra Samithi in the districts as families of over 1,700 TRS leaders were paid claims after the death of the party activists during the past few years.

Keeping in view the past experience, where family members of over 200 TRS leaders could not get the claim due to lack of proper documentation, the pink party has now taken up digitalisation of entire data. This insurance comes along with the membership of the party.

There are two types of memberships in the party, one- active member for which the fee is Rs 100 and primary member with a fee of Rs 30.

The party has given a target to in-charges to make sure that 35 per cent of the total members should be active members.

Along with the membership, the party provides accidental insurance cover of Rs 2 lakh. About 1700 families got the claims under the accidental insurance so far.

A senior leader of the party said that the idea behind membership fee was to provide insurance to the party leaders.

"Though the loss of human life cannot be compensated, the families of deceased TRS leaders would have got some respite because of the financial support," said the TRS leader.

However, claims pertaining to about 207 members were not settled so far because of litigations. The TRS leader said there were problems with data entry but the court has directed the insurance company to provide the claim money to the families of deceased.

Many families are coming forward to take the membership in villages and the insurance cover is one of the many factors attracting them, the leader added.

With such experience, the party is not taking chances this time and the leaders have been asked to get total details of the family, including the nominee by taking Aadhaar card, mobile number, etc.

The party has started digitisation of the membership drive and everyday data pertaining to 2 lakh members was being entered. The target of the party is to enrol 60 lakh members, 50,000 members in each constituency.

TRS working president K T Rama Rao said that by Friday, the membership reached 35 lakh and the data was getting digitised. Data pertaining to about 15 lakh members was already digitalised and the party had received Rs 7 crore so far.