Hyderabad: Slamming principal secretary (transport) Sunil Sharma for telling the High Court that the RTC employee unions had colluded with Opposition parties to topple the government, state Congress president N. Uttam Kumar Reddy urged Chief Justice Raghavendra Singh Chauhan to take cognizance of the matter and order a CBI inquiry or an independent probe into the allegations and unravel the truth.
Addressing a press conference at Gandhi Bhavan on Sunday, Mr Reddy said the High Court must inquire at whose instance the IAS officer had levelled such serious allegations. Mr Reddy, member of the Lok Sabha from Nalgonda, said that the Congress would raise the issue in Parliament and take up the issue with the department of personnel and training.
He strongly condemned the affidavit of Mr Sharma and said, “If his allegations are true, then all Opposition leaders should be arrested and jailed. If he is wrong, then he must be immediately dismissed from service for furnishing false information in the court,” Mr Reddy said.
The TPCC chief said that the TRS government had resorted to falsehoods by submitting wrong and misleading information before the High Court on the RTC issue multiple times. He said even the High Court had remarked that it had never seen officials lying so much before the court.
Mr Reddy said the allegations by the senior IAS officer have put the credibility of the High Court at stake and the Chief Justice must order a probe to know the truth.
He ridiculed the allegation of Opposition parties trying to topple the TRS government. He said it was the TRS which engineered defection of 12 MLAs to deny the Congress the status of main Opposition party.
The TPCC chief said the RTC employees had worked in September and they should be immediately paid for it. He alleged that Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao was treating Telangana state as his personal jagir (fiefdom).
Mr Reddy said the RTC was among the biggest such institutions in the world with huge assets and it should not be judged from the perspective of profit and loss. He said there were nearly 55,000 employees of the RTC at the time of state formation. Nearly 7,000 jobs were lost after the TRS came to power and now the state government wants to completely shut down the institution, he said. Calling Mr Rao the “most inhuman CM”, Mr Reddy said that the Chief Minister did not react even after the death of 24 employees in the last 40 days.
He said the Andhra Pradesh government, which was facing financial problems, was merging the RTC but Telangana state, which had claimed to be the richest in the country, was not willing to help the RTC. He reminded that even the Congress in its 2018 Assembly election manifesto had promised the merger of the RTC and the government and treat its employees on par with state staff.
Accusing Mr Rao of taking unilateral decisions, the TPCC chief demanded that the state government convene an all-party meeting to discuss the issue.
He announced that the Congress would support the ‘Sadak Bandh’ of the RTC JAC on Tuesday, and the party would extend its cooperation till the RTC workers get justice.
