HYDERABAD: The death of a Telangana-orgin of AP Secretariat employee at Velagapudi sparked tension at the Telangana Secretariat here on Thursday when Telangana-origin Grade IV employees of AP Secretariat tried to stage a dharna with the body.
Raj Kumar, a Grade IV employee and native of Telangana, was working in the directorate of information & public relations department in the capital of Andhra Pradesh. He died of cardiac arrest at Amaravati on Wednesday night.
The Telangana employees working in AP brought the body of Raj Kumar to Hyderabad from Velagapudi on Thursday and tried to stage a dharna at the Telangana Secretariat.
But, the large contingent of policemen deployed there, prevented the vehicle carrying the body of Raj Kumar from entering the TS Secretariat premises. It was stopped on the Necklace Road and the policemen prevailed upon the relatives to take away the body.
After the bifurcation of the united Andhra Pradesh, the CR Kamalanathan Committee allotted 883 Grade-IV employees to AP Secretariat. They comprised 233 from the Secretariat and 650 from various heads of departments (HoDs), and all of them hail from Telangana.
As per rules, all Grade-IV employees working in Hyderabad in HoDs and Secretariat were treated as state cadre employees. But, most of the Grade-IV employees, including drivers, attenders, record assistants and others, belonged to Telangana.
Last year, Mahbubnagar MLA and NGO leader V Srinivas Goud requested chief minister K Chandrasekhar Rao to absorb all the Grade-IV employees of Telangana origin but working in AP. But, even after one year, nothing has happened. They have even lost the Telangana special increment.