Emphasising the need for educating every child irrespective of caste and community, chief minister N Kiran Kumar Reddy called upon the parents and religious heads to take a pledge of ensuring that every child receives education.
“That is the only real tribute that can be paid to Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, a freedom fighter and the first education minister of India,” he said.
Addressing the programme organised at Ravindra Bharathi in Hyderabad on Sunday on the occasion of Azad’s birth anniversary, which is also being celebrated as Minority Welfare Day by state government and National Education Day by the Centre, chief minister said that the society could progress only through education. Quoting Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru ‘educate a woman and you educate an entire family’, Kiran Reddy said, “We have to strive to give equal opportunities to girls. Given a chance, they will outshine boys in any field,” he said.
“In the Old City of Hyderabad, we arranged a monitor (volunteer) for every hundred households to ensure that every school going child is being given education. The programme will be replicated in other parts of the state as well,” he said. He said they had allocated `12.5 crore for new Haj House in Shamshabad. Three new degree colleges have been sanctioned for old city, which will be constructed in Hyderabadi architecture, he explained. Kiran Reddy said his government had enhanced budgetary allocation for minorities from `30 crore in 2004-5 to `489 crore in 2012-13 and promised a big raise in the next budget.