Hyderabad: After the resounding success of the Five Guarantees of the Congress Party in Karnataka, the Congress Party’s social justice push has reached one more step up and ahead in Telangana. The well researched social justice guarantees announced by Sonia Gandhi, former president of the party, and a senior MP made a passionate appeal to the Lok Sabha special sitting on Wednesday, September 20, 2023, to immediately take up the social profiling and caste survey to deliver social justice to the last man and woman in the country.
This appeal has now added value to the five guarantees announced by Sonia Gandhi for the state of Telangana. The guarantees announced by Sonia Gandhi at Thukkuguda public meeting and her speech at Lok Sabha had a definite link to the long standing demands of the landless in the rural areas of Telangana and the abject poverty of the agricultural labour families in Telangana state.
The Bharatiya Rashtriya Samithi (BRS) and the Telugu Desam Party (TDP), after being in power in undivided Andhra Pradesh and the present Telangana state, had not taken up these issues head-on as the social sector developmental outlay of the budget at a meagre 2 -3 per cent per annum could not have improved the lives of over 35 lakh people in the agriculture labour families and landless rural households numbering 38.42 lakhs in the state.
According to sources in the labour department, the Telangana state has recorded a total of 35,01,278 agriculture labour households under Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme
On the same lines, under the social welfare scheme, Total number of landless households in Rural Telangana, as per Samagra Kutumba Survey, was 38,42,571 households.
The Telangana state also has a total of 22 lakh Tenant Farmers. It could be recalled that the Congress guarantees announced by the Party feature Rs. 15,000 per tenant farmers who is still without their own agricultural lands to cultivate. According to the ruralatt institute experts, this was a special incentive that is unique to Telangana state in the country. In addition party has announced an incentive of Rs. 12,000 per head. The spirit of these two guarantees announced by Sonia Gandhi in her speech in Thukkuguda will give additional impetus to the farm sector and will prevent the migration of farm labour from farm sector to other types of job markets the experts feel.
The politicos in TDP, BJP, and BRS are left speechless at this masterstroke of Congress party. Telangana is a state where labour movement and labour migration are rampant perennially, and unemployment and under-employment is reaching their peak following failure of monsoons in many consecutive seasons. All three parties had not thought about this aspect, and within themselves, a few economic thinkers feel that this is going to give them a run for their money in the coming assembly elections in Telangana.