Restore State BC Commission: Dasoju Sravan to KCR

AICC Spokesperson Dasoju Sravan today demanded that Chief Minister K Chandrashekar Rao immediately restore the Telangana BC Commission, whose tenure had expired on October 26th, 2019, to curtail the "gross discrimination" being committed against the BC community across Telangana's educational institutions and government departments.

In an open letter that he penned to the CM, the senior Congress leader also appealed to the latter to take steps to grant the commission constitutional status, and said that the same had been done in the neighbouring state of Andhra Pradesh as well.

He highlighted the "unjust" way in which the BC community of Telangana was being treated, and claimed that this was because of the lack of a statutory body monitoring the state's practices and enforcing the prescribed rules with regard to BC reservation.

"Telangana is the only state in India which has not adopted the 123rd Constitutional Amendment Bill of 2017 and the 102nd Amendment of 2018, through which the Government of India had converted the National Commission for BCs into a constitutional body under Article 338B of the Indian Constitution. It appears that the Telangana government deliberately did not provide constitutional status to state's BC Commission. While neighbouring states like Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka have adopted the aforementioned amendments and accorded constitutional status to the BC Commissions in their respective states, and have also invested in the complete empowerment of the bodies to protect the constitutional rights of the BCs, our state has made no such provisions. As a result, BC persons in Telangana are being deprived of their constitutional rights. The urgent need for a statutory body to which they can submit their grievances to protect their legitimate rights could not be clearer," Sravan alleged.

Reiterating his appeal, the Congress leader requested KCR to introduce a special bill to provide constitutional status to the Telangana BC Commission while restoring it by appointing "eminent, apolitical and dedicated persons" to the body who would do justice to the deprived community using their posts. He also recommended that these appointments be done in a transparent manner and not be done only to provide "political rehabilitation".

"Violations of reservation guidelines are an everyday occurrence now. This happens even in reputed state and central universities such as the Kaloji Narayana Rao University of Health Sciences, which declined MBBS seats to eligible BCs, and the English and Foreign Languages University, which did not implement BC reservations during its faculty recruitment process. The Hyderabad Central University also openly violates BC reservation guidelines. The issue must be addressed at the earliest. To begin with, I would urge the government to conduct a thorough enumeration and socio-economic study of the backward classes, as was ordered by the Telangana High Court in Writ Petition no 477/2018, in order to be able to enhance the required reservations commensurately," he added.