Telangana, Andhra separation will be long and painful

It has been a long and painful struggle to persuade the Centre to carve out Telangana out of Andhra Pradesh. But the exercise to execute this decision and split the resources of the state will be no less complicated. Aloke Tikku reports.

It has been a long and painful struggle to persuade the Centre to carve out Telangana out of Andhra Pradesh. But the exercise to execute this decision and split the resources of the state will be no less complicated.

The groundwork to split the assets and liabilities of Andhra Pradesh will begin much before Parliament carves out 10 districts into a new state.

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The first step will be to draw up an inventory of the assets and liabilities of undivided Andhra that – like its civil service – would be split between the new states.

A statue of former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi vandalized by anti-Telangana protestors in Ananthapur, Andhra Pradesh.

“It is certainly a long drawn out process that will see the two successor states squabbling,” said a senior government official associated with the task to oversee the distribution of assets when Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Uttarakhand were created in 2000.

And that process isn’t over yet.

The states created more than 12 years back are still fighting legal battles for what they perceive to be equitable distribution of the assets or reduce their liabilities. Add to this, the 500-plus cases filed by employees allotted to the new states against their willingness that are still pending in the high courts.

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No wonder, the first step towards creation of Telangana will be constitution of a Group of Ministers to work out the parameters of the split of the assets and liabilities as well as details such as the change to the constituencies.

A panel headed by the personnel secretary at the Centre will also finalise the ratio in which the state government employees will be allocated to Telangana and Andhra.

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“This ratio will tentatively be proportionate to the number of districts in each state,” a senior government official said. Telangana will have 10 districts against Andhra’s remaining 13 districts.

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