So far, several media houses and private entities have conducted their own surveys on Telangana polls and not surprisingly, the results of each and every survey highlighted an issue faced by TRS – dissatisfaction of Telangana unemployed Youth. Though it seems like one section of vote bank may not create fatal harm to TRS in Telangana, a careful scrutiny reveals other facts too.
If TRS had won in 2014 bypassing Congress Party, it is mainly because of Telangana sentiment and its most important election promise ‘creation of 1 lakh jobs’, the key part of ‘Bangaru Telangana’ promised by K Chandra Sekhar Rao. The role of students and their sacrifice was always one of the burning factors that led the Telangana movement. Even TRS acknowledged the same in several meetings before and after the formation of Telangana. Several students favoured the Telangana movement in hope for more job opportunities and even sacrificed their lives in the cause. But, did TRS live up to the expectations?. Let us see.
KCR promised that his government would provide 1 Lakh jobs within one year of coming to power. However, the official statistics of TSPSC reveals otherwise. Till date, TSPSC has released job notifications for 38,017 posts in various departments with only 15,118 jobs actually filled. Various factors like districts formation, Zonal creations, High court cases etc., have influenced right from the announcement of the notifications to the release of final results.
It must be noted that the State government is yet to complete the Group-2 recruitment process for the notification released in 2016 December, owing to HighCourt’s stay orders. Even the recently conducted Panchayat Raj secretary examination results are waiting for clearance from the High Court. It is high time that the Central government provides for special judicial benches in High Courts to clear such issues on a faster note, so that the results are announced on time.
The rate of unemployment stood at 25.03% as per the estimates of CMIE. This can be observed in the number of applications received by the TSPSC when it announced its notification for the recruitment of VRO posts. Several thousands of Phd scholars, M.Tech, MBA and MA graduates were seen as the applicants for the examination, which received 5 lakh applications on a whole. Not to mention, the minimum qualification for VRO is ‘intermediate’. The same continued for the post of Police constables. The unemployed youth of Telangana have conducted several protests in the last four years, but things remained the same.
The dissatisfaction among the Youth means that even their family members may not vote in favour of KCR and TRS. This might create a huge advantage for the Mahakootami over TRS, thereby, decreasing the margin of winning. The lower the margin, the more the competition. Surveys made it clear that TRS will not enjoy a sweeping majority like it did in 2014..which means a close election fight is on cards.