Hyderabad/Warangal: Siva Prasad, 21, bristles at Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) chief K. Chandrashekar Rao’s promise of increasing monthly old-age pensions from Rs 2,000 to Rs 5,000 if the Telangana electorate gives the chief minister a third consecutive term.
“This CM, who denies jobs to the youth, wants to hike pensions for our elders. Who needs such alms when an educated youngster in the family gets a good government job with a handsome salary?” asks Siva, a first-year MBA student at the Kakatiya University in Warangal.
Siva is one of lakhs of government job aspirants upset with KCR’s two terms in office, accusing the chief minister of failing to counteract “inordinate delays in recruitment notifications” and “back-to-back fiascos including exam paper leaks”.
“Never in his speeches does the chief minister talk about us educated youngsters, our aspirations. He probably thinks we are good enough only for gorlu, barlu,” says Siva’s classmate Sai A., referring to schemes of the KCR government aimed at distribution of sheep and buffaloes to farmers from marginalised communities at subsidised prices.
Siva is a first-time voter in Southeast Telangana’s Nalgonda while Sai will cast his ballot for the second time, in Nagarjuna Sagar. Both say they are inclined to vote against the incumbent as “it appears impossible to land a government job in the BRS regime”.
3.2 crore-strong electorate.
About 140 km from Kakatiya University, is Hyderabad’s Osmania University. Over a decade ago, both these varsities were at the centre of the student-led protests to demand statehood for Telangana.
Educated youngsters who took part in the agitation expected better job opportunities in a separate state. This sentiment stemmed from a feeling that better-paying jobs were being cornered by their counterparts from the Andhra side (when the two states were part of united Andhra Pradesh).
N. Narayana, 34, is back at Osmania University to pursue Master of Education (M.Ed.) in the hope of securing a teaching job with the government. The Osmania University hostels him and other scholars are lodged in continue to be in the same ramshackle condition they were in before the formation of Telangana. A voter in Achampet, he comes from the backward Medara community and pursued a Master of Science (M.Sc.) in Mathematics at Osmania University 11 years ago, when the statehood movement was at its peak.
For him, unemployment and corruption are reasons for which he will vote against the ‘car’ (BRS poll symbol) this time around.
Taking a morning stroll in front of the iconic Osmania University Arts College building, built by the seventh Nizam in the 1930s, Sanjay S., a MA student from the Scheduled Tribes (ST) community who comes from Parigi in western Telangana, has one reason to vote the incumbent out: Telangana State Public Service Commission (TSPSC) exam paper leaks.
TSPSC exam paper leaks
In Ashok Nagar, not far from Osmania University, a sense of despair looms large. The area, home to endless lanes of coaching centres and civil services aspirants, is the equivalent of Delhi’s Mukherjee Nagar.
“I will give my vote to the Congress, no doubt at all,” says 32-year-old Yuvaraj V. (name changed on request), a Group-I job aspirant who played a proactive role in the student-led agitation for statehood while pursuing M.Sc. in Mathematics from Osmania University (2012-14 batch).
“We put our life and career at stake for the sake of statehood. But after the formation of Telangana, only one family — that of KCR — prospered, while a whole generation of educated youngsters, their aspirations were devastated,” Yuvaraj tells ThePrint.
His criticism stems from the cancellation of preliminary exams for TSPSC’s Group-I posts, twice in the past year.
The first, held last October, was cancelled in March this year after it was found that exam papers were leaked allegedly by some TSPSC employees. The second, held in June, was cancelled in September by order of the Telangana High Court which ruled in favour of petitioners who pointed out irregularities in the conduct of the examinations such as disregard for biometric attendance and absence of hall ticket numbers from OMR sheets.
This set of examinations was the first to be held for Group-I posts since the formation of Telangana in 2014.
Along with Group-I prelims, the TSPSC had also cancelled the Divisional Accounts Officer (DAO) and Assistant Executive Engineers (AEE) examinations in March this year owing to exam paper leaks.
Yuvaraj and his friends allege that KCR withheld the Group-I notification to fill vacant posts in government including that of Deputy SP, revenue and commercial tax officials to keep the “enlightened Telangana student community, which took part in the agitation (for statehood), out of the system.”
When M. Pravallika, 24, died by suicide at a private hostel in Ashok Nagar this October, hundreds of aspirants took to the streets there for a spontaneous midnight protest alleging that postponement of Group-II preliminary exams on account of assembly elections drove her to take the extreme step.
Even as the Opposition Congress attacked the BRS, accusing it of misleading the public over the suicide and the BJP sought a thorough probe, the state police termed her death the result of a failed relationship.
Telangana minister KT Rama Rao (KTR), while lambasting Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge and party leader Rahul Gandhi for misleading people of the state on the issue, had on TV endorsed the claim that Pravallika was never a government job aspirant.
“This is not suicide, this is murder – of the dreams of the youth, their hopes and aspirations,” Rahul Gandhi had said in a post on X (formerly Twitter).
कल हैदराबाद में एक छात्रा की आत्महत्या का समाचार अत्यंत दुखद है।
ये आत्महत्या नहीं, हत्या है – युवाओं के सपनों की, उनकी उम्मीदों और आकांक्षाओं की।
तेलंगाना का युवा आज बेरोज़गारी से पूरी तरह टूट चुका है। पिछले 10 सालों में BJP रिश्तेदार समिति – BRS और BJP ने मिलकर अपनी अक्षमता…
— Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) October 14, 2023
If the Congress is voted to power in the state, Gandhi has promised to “release an (annual) job calendar, reorganise TSPSC on the lines of UPSC in the first month and fill two lakh vacant government posts within the first year”.
Barely a few days after he raised the issue of Pravallika’s suicide and anger mounted against the BRS government, KTR — who is also CM KCR’s son — met her family and offered her brother a government job and the family financial assistance.
On Monday, with less than two weeks to go for polling day, KTR met a group of government job aspirants from Ashok Nagar, hailing from different districts and assured them that if re-elected, the BRS will issue a “job calendar”, increase the number of Group-II posts, while also expediting the existing recruitment process.
“Learn the facts and debunk Congress’s false propaganda,” he appealed to aspirants.
KTR added that the Congress government in united Andhra Pradesh “filled merely 1,000 jobs per year, but we filled 16,000 jobs annually in these 9.5 years”. He also promised to meet the same aspirants in Ashok Nagar on the morning of 4 December, the day after counting of votes, to “thoroughly discuss all the government job filling related issues”.
However, the students of Kakatiya University did not appear impressed.
“KTR now says he will cleanse the TSPSC, reform the recruitment system. What was he doing all these months, since the paper leaks and exam cancellations,” asks Siva.
Unemployed in electoral fray
The anger over lack of quality jobs in Telangana is such that unemployed youngsters have jumped into the electoral fray in parts of the state as a mark of protest.
While a 32-year-old graduate told ThePrint that he had withdrawn his nomination in Gajwel against KCR at the last moment “owing to pressures” exerted on him and his family, some like Karne Sirisha have stood firm.
A candidate from Kollapur seat in south Telangana, Sirisha rose to fame as barrelakka (buffalo girl) after a viral reel she posted two years ago went viral. The reel featured Sirisha and four buffaloes with her claiming that her family bought them for her to farm as a source of income since ‘KCR had not issued any notifications for government jobs’.
Allotted the vigil symbol, the independent candidate is campaigning with the help of some youngsters and a reported sum of Rs 1 lakh from former Puducherry minister Malladi Krishna Rao.
(Edited by Amrtansh Arora)