The Telangana Assembly on Tuesday saw the entire Opposition cornering the Government on its failure to fill over 1.07 lakh vacancies in different Government departments across all categories.
Dissatisfied over the reply by Finance Minister Eatala Rajender, all Opposition parties barring the Majlis-e-Muslimeen staged a walkout after close to 100 minutes of discussion only on the question of vacancies in Government departments.
From the beginning of the Question Hour, the Opposition kept repeating that after nine months of the Telangana Rashtra Samithi's rule, its key promise of filling the vacancies had not been fulfilled. The Government was reminded that it rode to power on the support of youth and student community across the region. They sought to know, why there was unrest on the university campuses across Telangana within few months of the TRS Government coming to power.
Raising the issue, Congress MLA G. Chinna Reddy said that all these months after coming to power Government did not appear to be having any clarity on how it wants to go about fulfilling its promise of filling all 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).
Govt. non-committal
The Opposition parties argued that the Government was non-committal on filling the vacancies. Leader of Opposition K. Jana Reddy said that Government was not giving any clarity about when and how it would take up the process of filling the estimated over one lakh vacancies. The tone of others including Mr. Laxman, Sunnam Rajaiah (Communist Party of India-Marxist) and Mr. Ravindra Kumar Naik was pretty much the same.
Finance Minister Etela Rajender, who replied to the question accused the Opposition of trying to politicize the issue and blamed the earlier regimes of going back on its promise of filling vacant posts.
Reiterating that the TRS Government was committed to fill all the vacancies, he clarified that there was some delay as the final report on allotment of Government staff as per the Kamalnathan Committee report had not been received.
However, the delay was because they had to work their way around the hurdles that had been created all these years in the form of indiscriminate hiring by earlier Governments in the name of contractual employment or outsourcing jobs to private agencies.
He took a dig at the Congress and the Left Parties saying that they were talking in two voices. The Congress which ruled the State previously, had never bothered to fill the vacancies, while the Left parties, which had supported the then TDP Government was silent on contract employees' fate.
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 cadre strength was fixed.
First to stage a walkout was the BJP contingent. Led by Mr. Laxman, they left the House, followed by the Congress led by Mr. Jana Reddy, the CPI and the CPI-M.
