With Telangana Rashtra Samithi president and chief minister K Chandrasekhar Rao taking the forthcoming by-election to Huzurabad seriously, his government has decided to pump in Rs 2,000 crore on Dalit Bandhu scheme in the constituency to win over Dalits.
On Monday, the KCR government released another Rs 500 crore for the implementation of Dalit Bandhu scheme in Huzurabad constituency of Karimnagar district, where it has been taken up as a pilot project.
The money was credited to the account of Karimnagar district collector for disbursal among the beneficiaries of Dalit Bandhu towards various income-generating programmes.
Under the scheme, each family will receive Rs 10 lakh to establish their businesses or self-employment programmes as part of the efforts to improve the socio-economic conditions of Dalit community in the State.
On August 9, the government released an amount of Rs 500 crore for the scheme in Huzurabad as the first instalment and with the latest release of Rs 500 crore, the total amount to be spent in the constituency under Dalit Bandhu scheme has gone up to Rs 1,000 crore.
After launching the scheme in Huzurabad recently, chief minister K Chandrashekhar Rao directed the officials to release a total of Rs 2,000 crore for the implementation of the pilot project.
According to official sources, the Telangana government will release another Rs 1,000 crore within a week.
With this, the entire Rs 2,000 crore announced by the chief minister will be released in full.
According to the official figures, there are 20,929 Dalit families in the entire Huzurabad assembly constituency eligible for Dalit Bandhu scheme, including 5,323 families in Huzurabad mandal, 4,346 families in Kamalapur mandal, 3,678 in Veenavanka mandal, 4,996 families in Jammikunta mandal and 2,586 families in Illanthakunta mandal.
As such, the government would have to release Rs 2,093 crore for Huzurabad constituency to implement Dalit Bandhu scheme.
Interestingly, when the scheme was first announced as CM Empowerment of Dalits scheme in the annual budget, finance minister T Harish Rao allocated an an amount of Rs 1,000 crore for the scheme.
Later, at an all-party meet in June, the chief minister announced that 100 families from each of the 119 assembly constituencies in the state would receive Rs 10 lakh each to the eligible 11,900 people and the total amount was pegged at Rs 1200 crore.
Subsequenty, the chief minister announced that he would not hesitate to spend Rs 80,000 crore to Rs 1 lakh crore on the scheme for the uplift of the Dalits.
At the launch of the scheme in Huzurabad, KCR declared that all the 17 lakh eligible Dalit families would get the money under Dalit Bandhu scheme and the total allocation comes to around Rs 1.70 lakh crore.
He said his government would allocate Rs 30,000 crore-Rs 35,000 crore every year for the scheme in the budget. So, it would take five to six years to cover all the Dalit families!
