It is heartening to note that wiser counsel has prevailed and Telangana Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao has dropped his own brainchild, the Financial Assistance to Students of Telangana (FAST) scheme. Mr Rao, a prudent politician, should have visualised the problems with FAST, that was proposed to cover only students whose parents were born in Telangana before November 1, 1956. It would not even have covered those born in Telangana after 1956, not to speak of others in this melting pot of a city. Opposition parties apart, the High Court had taken a serious view of the scheme.
The Constitution has dealt with the issue of providing education and employement opportunities for the people of undivided AP by the creating the zonal system that demarcates local and non-local by Article 371 (D) way back in 1974. The AP Bifurcation Act specifically mentions the applicability of the Article in the two states. When that is the guarantee enshrined in the Constitution, there was no space for an argument that contravened the statute.
It is understandable if politicians are concerned about the injustice done to a region and fight for its rights but to achieve that one need not appear parochial. Indeed, the restrictions in FAST were quite contrary to Mr Rao’s visualisation of Hyderabad as a global city and his vow to enhance the living experience in the Telangana capital to international standards.
The fee reimbursement scheme introduced by the late Chief Minister Y.S. Rajasekhar Reddy was generally welcomed as it enabled poor students to join engineering, medical and other professional colleges almost for free. It can be argued that the scheme has led to the lowering of standards in engineering education. It would have been appropriate for Mr Rao to implement correctives instead of stopping payments for almost seven months, leaving poor students open to harassment from college managements. At the same time, one cannot rule out the political compulsions that led to the reversal of the decision, as the TRS looks to win the coming elections to the GHMC.
While Mr Rao has laid one controversy to rest, he has ignited a second with his decision to shift the 60-year-old Secretariat campus to the Chest Hospital campus at Erragadda. He has cited ‘bad vaastu’, rather than any administrative exigency. It is a decision that will be difficult for Mr Rao to defend, in the face of criticism that priorities for the newly formed state and the government could have been been better planned.
