Kishan Reddy said the Kavach Centre of Excellence would position indigenous railway safety technologies as a global model.
Hyderabad: Hyderabad, already home to over 50 national research institutions, is set to receive three more national-level institutes, Union minister G. Kishan Reddy announced on Friday. These are the Global Centre of Excellence on Millets, Kavach Centre of Excellence to advance indigenous railway safety technologies and a Training for Trainers centre for Industrial Training institutes.
He said the agriculture ministry had cleared the the Global Centre of Excellence on Millets, being set up with a budget of Rs 250 crore, and signed MoUs with several countries to set up this international-level research centre.
The facility will include a central instrumentation lab, state-of-the-art research infrastructure, including a gene-editing greenhouse, research farms, speed breeding labs and phenomics labs. Telangana farmers will be trained at the centre.
Kishan Reddy said the Kavach Centre of Excellence would position indigenous railway safety technologies as a global model. With an initial allocation of Rs 41 crore and a total project cost of Rs 274 crore, the centre will train railway pilots and technicians. Engineering students from Telangana will also benefit from training in railway signalling and Kavach technology. The centre has signed MoUs with Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Technology (Hyderabad), Madan Mohan Malaviya University (Gorakhpur) and MBM University (Jodhpur).
He said that as part of the Viksit Bharat initiative, the Centre had launched a Rs 60,000-crore project to upgrade Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs) nationwide. Five new Training for Trainers’ centres will be established in Hyderabad, Bhubaneswar, Chennai, Kanpur and Ludhiana.
On paddy procurement issue, the union minister said the Centre was ready to purchase all paddy procured by the state government, which had already agreed to supply 53 lakh tonnes. He said there is “not a single rupee burden” on the state in this procurement and urged it to set up additional purchase centres to benefit farmers.
Responding to BRS MLC K. Kavitha’s letter to her father and former chief minister K. Chandrashekar Rao, Kishan Reddy dismissed it as a “family drama,” labelling the BRS a “sinking ship.” He accused the former chief minister of ignoring requests for meetings from farmer, student, youth and women's associations during his tenure. “Even I was denied an appointment in 2019 after becoming a Union minister,” Reddy said. He claimed the BRS had degenerated into a “Daddy-Daughter-Son-Son-in-law party” and had no future in the state.
