HYDERABAD : The new state of Telangana and the residuary state of Andhra Pradesh are now well and truly at war and the time for an arbitrator to step in has come.
With efforts to settle issues at the state level by way of mutual discussions having come to a naught, the Telangana government has now urged the Union government to create a standing mechanism for “dispute resolution” between the two states on the ground that measures/methods prescribed in the AP Reorganisation Act are not being followed by Andhra Pradesh.
While the two states have been fighting over sharing of power and water -- key drivers of economic activity, a series of unsavoury episodes involving control over functioning and funds pertaining to commercial and non-commercial institutions have only led to more friction. The turning point was the alleged attempt by the AP government to hive off Rs 400 crore from a welfare board meant for construction workers. This money, the TS government argued, was meant to be transferred to Telangana but diverted to AP, a charge denied by the latter.
In a letter to the Cabinet Secretary a few days ago, Telangana Chief Secretary Rajiv Sharma is understood to have requested that a mechanism be activated either in the Cabinet secretariat or the Home Ministry, duly associating the Ministry of Law and Justice for “interpreting the provisions of the AP Reorganisation Act and issuing appropriate directions for compliance.”
The TS Chief Secretary, according to sources, wrote a lengthy letter in which he argued that the Government of AP has been “unilaterally and without the knowledge of Telangana taking recourse to options other than those prescribed in the Act and thus hurting the functioning of the nascent State”.
The argument of Telangana appears to be that the residuary state is adopting a “pick and choose” method when it comes to sharing funds/assets/staff of numerous institutions which are listed in Schedule VII (public funds), Schedule IX (commercial) and Schedule X (non-commercial) of the Act. “When a division of this nature happens, it is important that the parent (residuary state) takes the responsibility and implements a fair and equitable distribution as per the Act. It is possible that either state gains in some areas and loses in some. But we cannot be selective in arriving at a formula and, in any case, the provisions of the Act, which came into force by way of a Constitutional amendment, should form the basis,” a TS official said.
Things have reached a flashpoint now that with the two states at loggerheads, PSU banks holding deposits/funds of public enterprises have frozen the money as it stood on June 2, 2014, when the bifurcation came into being.
As for stance of AP, a senior official told this newspaper that much of the discord was on account of lack of clarity on various provisions of the Act and that they were not doing anything deliberate to run down Telangana state.