As it firms up its report on the Telangana statehood issue, the Justice B.N. Srikrishna Committee will travel to Hyderabad on December 16 for an informal meeting with leaders of political parties in Andhra Pradesh.
The five—member panel, which travelled extensively across the state for four months to elicit people’s views on the statehood demand, will submit its report by December 31, when its deadline ends.
“The Committee will submit its report by December 31 and we are very clear in that. The process of preparing the report is on full swing. We will stick to the deadline,” a senior member of the Committee told PTI .
He said the full committee will travel to Hyderabad on December 16 for an informal meeting with leaders of all political parties in the state.
“It is just an informal meeting. Rather we can call it a ‘thanks giving meeting’ We want to personally thank the leaders for the cooperation they extended to us during the past 10 months,” the member said.
Chief Minister Kiran Kumar Reddy is also expected to attend the informal meeting.
The committee had also held an informal meeting with all stakeholders concerned in March before it kicked off its consultations on the statehood issue.
The panel, which also has former Union Home Secretary V K Duggal, has received over one lakh petitions and representations from political parties, organisations, NGOs and individuals. It also held consultations with political parties and general public.
Sources say the report will be based on the opinions given by people on the contentious statehood issue.
The panel has been mandated to examine the situation in Andhra Pradesh with reference to the demand for a separate state of Telangana as well as the demand for maintaining the present status of united Andhra Pradesh.
The impact of recent developments on different sections of people such as women, children, students, minorities, Other Backward Classes, Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes will also be factored by the committee.
Other members of the committee are Ranbir Singh, vice chancellor of the National Law University (Delhi), Abu Saleh Shariff, senior research fellow in International Food Policy Research Institute (Delhi), and Rabinder Kaur, professor at the department of humanities and social sciences at Indian Institute of Technology—Delhi.
