Hyderabad: Four Congress MPs from the state have written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, seeking his intervention to “save” the TSRTC and its 49,000 employees and their families from the “inhuman attitude” of the TRS government.
Congress Lok Sabha members N. Uttam Kumar Reddy, Komatireddy Venkat Reddy and A. Revanth Reddy and Rajya Sabha member M.A. Khan wrote that the APSRTC in the undivided state was the largest and best public transport corporation in the country and had been mentioned in the Guin-ness Book of Records.
After the division of state, the bifurcation of the APSRTC had not been completed in a proper manner.
There was no documentation to show the concurrence of the Centre which owns 33 per cent of the undivided APSRTC.
The MPs said that the number of employees with the TSRTC had come down from 57,000 at the time of bifurcation to 49,000 a few moths ago. The properties of the TSRTC were located in prime areas in the cities and are worth tens of thousands of crores.
The MPs said that about 49,000 TSRTC employees had been on strike for over 50 days, and 30 of them had either committed suicide or died due to heart attack.
Their major demand was the merger of the RTC with the government as had been done recently by Andhra Pradesh, reimbursement of subsidies and others.Now that the RTC employees had called off the strike and wished rejoin duty unconditionally, the state government was using the police in an inhuman and brutal manner to prevent them, the MPs said.
The Members of Parlia-ment alleged that the government was trying to close down the TSRTC and hand over the routes to private operators which would make public transport to remote rural areas significantly costlier.
