Hyderabad: While releasing a white paper on education and health on Thursday here, AP Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu said, "We will distribute the costs of fee reimbursement on the population ratio like many other things. AP government will pay 58 per cent and Telangana should pay 42 per cent.”
“When there is a six-point formula, when there is the Presidential Order, how can they introduce a new rule for nativity? Why should people pay taxes if you don’t give them any benefits? As governments, we should work for development,” Mr Naidu said.
But the sharing formula might work for the pending arrears from previous years that the governments owe the engineering colleges. About Rs 2,500 crore is yet to be paid for fee reimbursement to colleges in both states. The Chief Minister complained that dropouts had increased in schools.
"The past decade was characterised by the lost opportunity of failing to capitalise on the huge potential of both the demographic dividend and the social capital in spite of the strong foundation and funds availability," He said.
He also attributed this to the categorisation of Andhra Pradesh as a less developed state by the RBI last year. He added that during his previous tenure, literacy had risen by 17 per cent while during the Congress government’s term it rose only by 8 per cent. In almost all educational indicators like Gross Enrollment Ratio, Net Enrollment Ratio and other quality parameters, AP is behind other southern states, he said. On engineering colleges, he said they had mushroomed without planning as a result of which quality had reduced and new universities were still being run from temporary locations.
