KCR Has Cheated Singareni Workers: Congress

Telangana Pradesh Congress Committee (TPCC) President N Uttam Kumar Reddy today accused Chief Minister K Chandrashekar Rao of cheating the workers of Singareni Collieries.

Addressing a press conference at Gandhi Bhavan on Friday along with INTUC National President G Sanjeeva Reddy and other leaders after holding a meeting on the Singareni Collieries elections, Uttam Kumar Reddy said that the Chief Minister had failed to provide the dependent jobs for SCCL employees, and was wrongly blaming the Congress for the same.

He said that the Congress was in total favour of giving jobs to the dependents of the Singareni workers, and asked KCR to adopt a sincere approach towards the issue.

Further, he said that the TRS had promised regularisation of contract workers in SCCL, but that after winning the elections, KCR had taken a U-turn and even claimed in the Assembly that there were no contract workers in Singareni. He said that there were more than 25,000 contract workers in Singareni, and that all of them were cheated by the TRS government.

Uttam Kumar Reddy also slammed KCR for taking a U-turn on the issue of open cast mining. He said that KCR, during the election campaigning, had promised to ban open cast mining. However, he had approved 16 open cast mines after coming to power in June 2014.

He also accused the TRS government of failing to fulfill the promise of constructing permanent houses for the Singareni workers. He also said that nearly 60,000 workers who had participated in Sakala Jana Samme during the Telangana statehood agitation for 35 days were promised payment of wages for the strike period, but while the money had been paid to those in service, nearly 10,000 workers who participated in the agitation but retired later were denied payment.

The TPCC chief also condemned the TRS government for not fulfilling its promise of establishing a medical college and a NIMS-level super-speciality hospital for Singareni workers.

Uttam Kumar Reddy informed that the TPCC had constituted a committee headed by former Chief Whip Gandra Venkataramana Reddy to study the problems being faced by the Singareni workers who were spread across 5 Lok Sabha and 24 Assembly constituencies. He said that the committee would interact with the Singareni employees and their families to list out the problems and challenges being faced them on a daily basis. The committee would also organise a "yatra" of senior Congress leaders across the 24 Assembly constituencies.

He said that the TPCC and INTUC would work in close coordination in the future.