Govt blind to students’ woes: Uttam

FEE fuss

Hyderabad: Telangana Pradesh Congress Committee (TPCC) president N Uttam Kumar Reddy strongly condemned the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) government for not clearing fee reimbursement dues of over 14 lakh students in the State.

Addressing a hugely attended students’ rally ‘Vidyarthi Garjana’, organised by National Students Union of India (NSUI) in Mahbubnagar on Tuesday, the TPCC president said the fee reimbursement dues were not cleared despite giving several assurances. “This clearly shows that either Chief Minister K Chandrashekar Rao is not serious on clearing the dues or the State’s Exchequer is completely empty,” he said.

Uttam Kumar Reddy slammed the Chief Minister for not responding to the ongoing protest by lakhs of students and their parents who are demanding immediate payment of fee reimbursement dues which are pending for the last two years.

Further, families of nearly 2.5 lakh staff of private colleges were almost starving due to non-payment of salaries for the last 4-6 months, he said. “Chandrashekar Rao has been cheating innocent students and already suffering staff of private colleges,” he alleged.

The TPCC chief resolved that the Congress workers would not rest until the State government cleared the entire dues of nearly Rs 3,000 crore towards fee reimbursement dues. “Chandrashekar Rao neither honoured the promise which he made in the State Assembly nor did he show any seriousness in implementing the decision taken by his own Cabinet.

He is simply not interested in students’ affairs and playing with their lives and careers. He is proving to be a Chief Minister only for contractors and middlemen who could fetch him commissions,” he alleged.

Uttam Kumar Reddy said the fee reimbursement scheme was launched by the previous Congress regime to ensure that the poorest of poor students got higher education. However, he alleged that the TRS government had completely sabotaged the scheme and deliberately stopped payments to discourage poor students from continuing their studies. He said the entire education sector in Telangana was in doldrums.

Welcoming the Supreme Court’s decision to refer the issue of legislators’ defections to the Constitutional Bench, the TPCC chief said that the verdict clearly showed that Chandrashekar Rao was wrong in making MPs, MLAs and MLCs of other parties defect to TRS fold. He said the Supreme Court had rightly questioned on what should be done if the Speaker was unreasonably delaying a decision and if the defections were not as per the law.

He hoped that the Constitutional Bench of the Supreme Court would give a landmark decision against the defectors to prevent this morally incorrect and constitutionally illegal activity in future. By encouraging large scale defections, he said Chandrashekar Rao had set a wrong precedent in the new State of Telangana.

The meeting was also addressed by party MLAs D K Aruna, G Chinna Reddy, NSUI national president Amrita Dhwaj, TPCC vice-president Dr Mallu Ravi, DCC president Obaidullah Kotwal, Municipal Chairman Radha Amar and other senior leaders.