HYDERABAD: Even before the jubilation for winning the Munugode Assembly bypoll had died down, the TRS has its sights set on the next poll — the Teacher MLC election for the Hyderabad-Ranga Reddy-Mahabubnagar (HRRM) constituency scheduled for March.
The party's leadership has set targets for TRS MLAs in these three districts to enroll a large number of teachers working in private schools as voters. The party leaders have already started meeting leaders of private schools’ management associations and seeking their cooperation for higher voter enrollment.
For the first time, the Election Commission has given private teachers the opportunity to enroll as voters for the election. Teachers of Classes 8 to Class and with a service of three years are eligible to register as voters. Teachers have to submit salary statements of the previous three years besides details of EPF and ESI to the District Education Officer (DEO) concerned who has to give approval after examining all these records. Teachers will be enrolled as voters based on DEO's approval.
The EC's original deadline to enroll as voters ended on November 7 but it was extended by this month end following the representations submitted by private schools’ managements associations. They brought to the notice of the EC that the DEOs were delaying approvals which led to poor enrollment.
In the previous teacher MLC election held in March 2017, TRS-backed Katepally Janardhan Reddy won by a margin of nearly 10,000 votes over United Teachers' Federation (UTF) candidate T.Manik Reddy. At that time, there were nearly 20,000 teachers from government schools, who exercised their franchise. This time, the number is expected to increase significantly with the enrollment of private teachers.
Various government teachers’ unions in Telangana are upset at the TRS government for stopping promotions since 2015 and transfers since 2018. The unions are also holding agitation programmes in several districts since December last year to protest against GO 317 issued by the state government on transferring teachers to their native districts as per new zonal system brought by the state government.
Against this backdrop, the TRS leadership is worried that the majority of the government teachers will not vote for TRS and to overcome this, it wants to rely on private teachers by enrolling them as voters in large numbers.
The TRS leaders are aggressively campaigning that the state government was the only one which distributed 25 kgs of rice and `2,000 per month to every private teacher during the Covid induced lockdown when schools were shut in 2020 and 2021 and seeking their support in MLC election.
