Icing on the cake
Women power came to the fore at the State-sponsored Pratibha Awards- 2016, held at the Indira Gandhi Municipal Corporation Stadium in Vijayawada on Saturday.
Besides Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu and Ministers Palle Raghunatha Reddy and Ganta Srinivasa Rao, the dais was dominated by women bureaucrats.
The very presence of Secretary, Higher Education Department, Sumita Dawra, Commissioner of School Education K. Sandhya Rani and Commissioner for Technical Education B. Udaya Lakshmi was a source of great inspiration to the large number of girl students who assembled at the venue from the 13 districts of the State. The announcement by Mr. Naidu that girls outnumbered boys in the list of 6,600 meritorious students who were to be felicitated on the occasion was like the proverbial icing on the cake!
Brother-sister duo on a
foreign jaunt
Amid hectic political activity following reorganisation of districts in Telangana, there is a brother- sister duo in the top echelons of power that is on a different mission.
Industries Minister K.T. Rama Rao has flown to the U.S. to attract investments to Telangana while his sister and Nizamabad MP Kavitha has toured nearly 10 countries to participate in Batukamma celebrations. Mr. Rao is in the U.S. for the second time in five months and contacting honchos of the industry, including Johnson & Johnson. Last year, his father and Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao was in China and Hong Kong on a similar mission.
While Mr. Rama Rao’s efforts are yielding result as several companies have evinced interest in starting operations in the State, Ms. Kavitha has helped in building a cultural bond with the Telangana diaspora overseas.
The birth pangs
The reorganisation of districts has seen much clamour due to the ways in which powers that be reshaped the map of the State.
A case in point is creation of Shadnagar revenue division at the last hour. Word has it that the local MLA of TRS, Anjaiah Yadav, met the Chief Minister and sought the division along with a mandal carved out of Kothur. Permission from Ranga Reddy and Mahabubnagar Collectors was obtained in a jiffy and the demand conceded.
Creation of Asifabad district from the parent Adilabad is another instance of giving into the demand of the local MLA after the initial notification was published. Such are the tales of birth pangs associated with the newly-created districts.
Is State
budget-surplus?
Is the government really budget-surplus as is often claimed or is it just an eyewash?
While the bigwigs keep harping on it and the Opposition sniping, the reality is that we have private hospitals refusing to take up Aarogyasri cases every month or so because of mounting arrears which the senior officials concerned accept and this could sound death-knell to smaller nursing homes.
Also, there is mounting fee reimbursement arrears running into hundreds of crores and the managements are resorting to beating the small fry like denying certificates to students and salaries to teachers. While the money is said to be pumped towards irrigation works, what about other welfare activities?
Shortage of AIS officers
Reorganisation of districts in Telangana, the exercise that culminated in increasing the number of districts from 10 to 31, has brought the problem of scarcity of IAS and IPS officers to square one. The youngest State which struggled badly for over half the time in its 28-month journey so far with shortage of AIS officers was able to barely cope up with the issue when creation of more administrative units unsettled it all over again.
A glaring inevitability caused by the shortage of AIS officers is that only Mahabubnagar district has an IAS officer as the Joint Collector and the post in the remaining 30 districts is held by either Special Grade Deputy Collectors or Deputy Collectors.
The situation is unlikely to change in the near future though the State government has made a special request to the Centre to allot it more AIS officers.
(Reporting by P. Sujatha Varma, N. Rahul, Rohit P.S., V. Geetanath &
B. Chandrashekhar)
