Telangana Government cornered on jobs

Unhappy over Eatala reply, entire Oppn walks out

Hyderabad: The Telangana Assembly on Tuesday saw the entire Opposition coming together and cornering the government for its failure to fill over 1.07 lakh vacant posts in different departments of all categories. Unhappy over the reply by Finance Minister Eatala Rajender, the Opposition parties, barring the Majlis-e-Muslimeen, staged a walkout after close to 100 minutes of discussion on the subject.

From the beginning of the Question Hour, the Opposition kept repeating that even nine months after the Telangana Rashtra Samithi coming to power, its key promise of filling the vacancies had not been fulfilled. The government was reminded that it rode to power with the support of youth and student community across the region. They sought to know as to why there was unrest on the university campuses across Telangana within a few months of the TRS government coming to power.

Raising the issue, Congress MLA G Chinna Reddy said the government did not appear to have any clarity on how it wanted to go about fulfilling its promise of filling the vacancies. He was followed by Communist Party of India (CPI) member Ravindra Kumar Naik, Floor Leaders K Laxman (Bharatiya Janata Party) and Akbaruddin Owaisi (Majlis-e-Muslimeen) attacking the government on the subject.

The main Opposition Congress, BJP, CPI and CPM leaders felt that the government was non-committal on filling up of the vacancies. Leader of Opposition K Jana Reddy said the government was not giving any clarity about when and how it would take up the process of filling up the estimated over one lakh vacancies.

Laxman, Sunnam Rajaiah of the CPM and Ravindra Kumar Naik also accused the government of having failed to keep up its promise. Finance Minister Eatala Rajender, who replied to the question, accused the Opposition of trying to politicise the issue and blamed the earlier regimes of going back on the promise of filling the vacant posts.

Reiterating that the TRS government was committed to filling all the vacancies, he clarified that there was some delay as the final report on the allotment of government staff as per the Kamalnathan Committee report had not been received. However, the delay was because they had to overcome hurdles created by earlier governments which indiscriminately hired employees on contract and outsourced jobs to private agencies.

MIM Floor Leader Akbaruddin Owaisi wanted the government to reply with accurate statistics as to how many temporary employees, permanent, outsourced and on contract were there across the state. He also sought to know if the cadre strength was fixed.