Congress MP and former TPCC president N. Uttam Kumar Reddy demanded the State government to immediately release fee reimbursement dues of ₹3,270 crore pertaining to nearly 12 lakh students.
He said the TRS government owes ₹828 crore for the year 2020-21 while not a single rupee has been released for the academic years 2021-22 and 2022-23, taking the total dues to ₹3,270 crore. This has affected over 12 lakh students of nearly 3,600 professional and non-professional colleges, he said.
Mr. Reddy was addressing a press conference at Gandhi Bhavan along with TPCC campaign committee chairman Madhu Yakshi Goud, disciplinary committee chairman Dr. G. Chinna Reddy, working president Dr J. Geetha Reddy, senior vice president Zafar Javeed, official spokesperson Sudhir Reddy and D. Bhaskar Reddy.
Mr. Reddy said that before 2014, funds used to be automatically released by the then Congress government on a timely basis. In the earlier regime, the release order was equivalent to the transfer of funds. But today, even after receiving the token, there is no guarantee of money being released. Private colleges have nearly 1.25 lakh employees and due to non-release of fee reimbursement funds, at least 30,000 people have lost jobs, he said.
‘Non-starter scheme’
The Congress MP also described the ‘Mana Ooru, Mana Badi’ as a non-starter and just another hollow scheme. He said that the State government did not release the entire ₹3,497 crore which it announced would be spent in the first phase to upgrade 9,123 out of over 26,000 schools. Only administrative sanction was accorded for the amount, but it was reportedly not approved by the Finance Department, he claimed.
Accusing the government of neglecting education, he said 30,000 teachers' vacant posts were not filled. Spending on the education sector was brought down from 10.80% of the total budget in 2014-15 to just 6.24% in 2022-23. He said that almost 90% of minority institutions have shut down since 2014. As against 53 minority engineering colleges in 2014-15, there are now just eight colleges, he said.
Mr. Reddy claimed that under the Congress regime in 2013-14, a total of 1,17,073 students were getting post-metric scholarships and the allocated amount was ₹35.77 crore. Today, this number got reduced to 71,591 and the allocation has been reduced to ₹18.92 crore. Similarly, number of beneficiaries from minority communities under RTF got reduced by 84,237 in the last seven years, he said.
