Telangana government comes up with Plan B'

Hyderabad: The TS government is exploring options to minimise its losses in case the Supreme Court rules in favour of AP on sharing of assets and liabilities of common institutions listed under Schedule IX and X of the AP Reorganisation Act.  

Till now, TS has not received any indication from the Centre that it will come to the rescue of the state by filing an affidavit in the apex court in its support, as sought by CM K. Chandrasekhar Rao.

TS fears that it may lose up to Rs 70,000 crore to AP if assets of all departments have to be shared as per the previous Supr-eme Court judgement in the education department case in the ratio of 48 per cent for TS and 52 per cent for AP on the basis of the population.

The government is planning to ask some indepe-ndent institutions which function with their own financial resources and depend on the government for funds, to move the Supreme Court agai-nst sharing of assets with AP and urging it to bring them outside the purview of the bifurcation Act.

If such institutions are brought outside the purview of the Act, the losses may be reduced to less than Rs 20,000 crore. Mr Rao had recently written to Union home minister Rajnath Singh stating, “The institutions listed under this are societies, statutory bodies, commissions and universities. A small number of these institutions are parts of departments that are exclusively dependent upon the government for staff and budget, whereas a majority have their own sources of income and do not depend on the government for their functioning. In all such cases, it would not be correct to club the assets and liabilities of these institutions along with the assets and liabilities of AP. These institutions have independent legal existence and there is a specific provision in the Act, i.e, Section 75, as to continuation of the facilities in these institutions.”

“Only a few institutions are functioning in both AP and TS. There would be no objection if the ass-ets and liabilities of these institutes are shared. But a majority of them are located only in TS and have independent legal existence. It’s not proper to share them with AP,” said a CMO official.