Unrest forces Centre to speed up Telangana and AP staff split

Hyderabad: With daily tussle between government employees of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh over “provisional allotment” to the two states, the Centre-appointed Kamalanathan committee has stepped up efforts to make “permanent allotment” by providing options to employees to choose the state of their choice.

The committee has decided to meet on June 30 at the Secretariat for finalising the draft guidelines for permanent allotment of employees. The committee has identified about 55,000 state-cadre employees who need to be divided. However, determining ‘nativity’ continues to be the contentious issue.

While the committee is in favour of determining nativity based on information in their service registers, Telangana employees are strongly opposing this alleging that service records of Seemandhra employees have been tampered with to enable them to secure posting in Hyderabad. They argue that the ‘place of birth’ has to be taken into account and not place of schooling, etc.

Under provisional allotment, employees were divided between both the states based on the ratio of population in the respective states. This was done as there was urgency to meet the June 2 bifurcation deadline so as to enable both the governments run administrative functions sans glitches.

However, the initiative backfired as many Telangana employees were allotted to AP state and vice-versa leading to severe resentment among employees, especially from Telangana region.

Telangana employees refused to work for AP state and demanded that they should be re-allotted to T-state by transferring back the Seemandhra employees allotted to Telangana state. Similarly, many Seemandhra employees, assigned to work in Telangana, were reluctant to join duties anticipating trouble from the Telangana employees.

However, all the employees fell in line and joined duties after the government threatened them of suspension and non-payment of salary, if they failed to report to respective states within the June 2 deadline.

The committee will finalise the guidelines for staff distribution on June 30 and seek objections from employees. Later, they will be referred to the Centre for approval. Once the Centre accords approval, the distribution of staff will be completed at the earliest.

Though the earlier deadline to complete the task was March 2015, the committee wants to complete the process within three-four months to pacify restive employees.

But trouble continues till date since with employees from the regions engaging in intense showdown on regional grounds, affecting the functioning of various departments in state-level offices in Hyderabad, especially in the Secretariat.