Hyderabad, March 17 (IANS) The Telangana government on Monday launched the Rajiv Yuva Vikasam scheme aimed at providing financial assistance to SC, ST, Backward Classes and minority youth to take up self-employment.
Chief Minister A. Revanth Reddy launched the scheme in the Assembly premises in the presence of Deputy Chief Minister Mallu Bhatti Vikramarka, ministers, legislators and senior officials.
The Chief Minister said that the state government has decided to provide self-employment opportunities to 5 lakh unemployed youth by allocating Rs 6,000 crore.
Under the scheme, the beneficiary will get financial assistance from Rs 50,000 to Rs 4 lakh. The government will announce the list of beneficiaries on June 2.
Assistance will be provided to 4,000 to 5,000 beneficiaries in every Assembly constituency. He said the real unemployed should benefit from the scheme.
He recalled that within 48 hours of coming to power, the Congress government in the Assembly premises had launched the free bus travel scheme for women and enhanced Arogyasri’s limit to Rs 10 lakh.
The Chief Minister said the government recruited more than 57,000 people in the government departments during the last 15 months. The government is supplying up to 200 units of free power to 50 lakh poor families while cooking gas cylinders at Rs 500 is benefiting 43 lakh families.
The government has also decided to distribute 1 crore 30 lakh quality sarees to women of self-help groups.
Revanth Reddy said the government was also supplying free electricity to 29,500 government schools in the state and it handed over the management of government schools to women self-help groups in the name of Amma Adarsh schools.
Referring to Congress leader Rahul Gandhi’s statement that the caste census is like an X-ray of society, he said the state government conducted the caste census and accordingly enhanced the reservation for Backward Classes (BC).
He said the caste survey revealed that the BC population in the state is 56.36 per cent and the government decided to provide 42 per cent reservation to BCs in education, job and political opportunities. Two Bills in this regard were adopted by Assembly on Monday.
The Chief Minister pointed out that a Bill for sub-categorisation of the Scheduled Castes was also introduced in the Assembly. The government is committed to render justice to SCs by adopting the Bill.
Revanth Reddy claimed that the Congress government reformed the administration and moved forward with a transparent policy. “We did not back down even though state revenues were decreased and debt burden increased. We do not want to run the government on lies. This is the reason the government adopted austerity measures and moved on according to a plan,” he said.
The Chief Minister said the government was making efforts to increase revenue through sand sales by streamlining the policies and the system. The previous government generated only Rs 1.50 crore revenue from sand sales every day. Now, it has been increased to Rs 3.5 crore due to strict measures taken by the government.
He claimed that Telangana tops the states in the tax collection. The unemployment problem has been reduced from 8.8 to 6.6 per cent.
Telangana is ahead of other states in controlling the inflation rate at 1.3 per cent. The Union government released the statistics officially, he said.
–IANS
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