Happy days for Telugu Desam activists

Hyderabad: Around three lakh activists of the Telugu Desam are set to get nominated posts or some government projects. With the Assembly Budget Session having concluded, AP Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu has begun working on filling nominated posts. It is expected that Mr Naidu will nominate some committees by the month end. To facilitate this, the government had issued an Ordinance removing all temple and agriculture market committees. The Ordinance was replaced by a Bill in the recent Session. To accommodate more activists, the government has increased the number of members in the committees. The term of the market committees has been reduced to two years from three.

Depending on their income, the temple committees had either five or nine members. The government has added two more members in all temple committees apart from two ex-officio members. An additional seat has been created in all market committees. Those benefiting will be the average party workers and leaders at the village, mandal and district levels. Mr Naidu asked the ministers to give the list of “real and sincere” workers, who had worked for the party for 10 years.

AP has around 22,000 temples including major ones like the Kanakadurga temple in Vijayawada, Srikalahastiswara temple, in Srikalahasti, which have more than Rs 1 crore income every year. If the average size of the temple committee is taken as 12, about 2.64 lakh TD activists will get placements. Agriculture market committees have either 18 or 11 members, and two new vacancies have been created.  At an average size of 15 members, 2,670 TD workers will get nominated posts in 178 market committees. Those who won’t find themselves in these committees might get government works worth less than Rs 5 lakh to contractors on nomination basis, in every Assembly constituency.