Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao has promised to announce good news for home guards and non-muster roll (NMR) staff of electricity shortly as it was decided to regularise their services.
He said 24,000 home guards and 25,000 NMR staff, the latter working on outsourcing basis, would be made permanent staff and given regular salaries. The home guards got an honorarium of only Rs 3,000 initially in Congress rule but the TRS government hiked it to Rs 12,000. Efforts were also on to regularise services of contract staff, Mr. Rao said addressing a meeting at the party office to mark the joining of former TDP MP Ramesh Rathod and former AP Public Service Commission member P. Ravinder Rao.
Speaking on a wide range of issues touching the TRS government’s performance, he asked the farmers not to nurse any apprehensions about the availability of fertilizers with agricultural operations set to begin in a week as the government had stocked 12 lakh tonnes of di-ammonium phosphate.
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He asked farmers not to furnish false information about their land holdings to Agricultural Extension Officers who would be visiting them in an enumeration programme up to June 10 for depositing ₹4,000 an acre as input cost borne by the government. The money would be transferred to the bank accounts standing in the names of only those who held lands.
The next one year would be spent by the government in developing crop colonies on the agriculture front. Training programmes would be imparted to farmers till June next year. There would be village, mandal, district and State level farmers federations.
The farmers would not be allowed to shift their agricultural produce to market yards at will but the mandal level federation would negotiate with commission agents on the price and then invite farmers to dispose of stock village-wise.
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The minimum support price would be maintained at any cost. The State-level federation whose chairman would enjoy the powers of the Chief Minister would be vested with a market intervention fund of ₹1,000 crore if the prices crashed. There would, however, be no election to the farmers federations as they would assume political colour, he said.
Giving an example of how good things happened in the TRS government, he recalled that the revenue on sand quarrying fell from ₹22 crore per annum to ₹5 lakh in Congress rule.
The TRS checked smuggling which earned a revenue of ₹370 crore in 2015-16 and ₹432 crore in 2016-17. It was likely to go up to ₹650 crore this year. People saw how TRS had made a difference.