Hyderabad, February 4
The growing rift between Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Kiran Kumar Reddy and the Telangana protagonists within the ruling Congress appears to have reached a flashpoint.

The pro-Telangana leaders delivered a big blow to the Chief Minister by successfully scuttling the launch of his pet scheme “Rajiv Yuva Kiranalu” (RYK), an employment programme for the youth. The Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was to visit the state today to formally launch the scheme and hand over appointment letters to the beneficiaries.

The RYK is aimed at imparting training and skills to the youth in relevant fields and facilitating their absorption into the industry.

However, Telangana Congress leaders had shot off a letter to the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), saying the scheme was “ill-conceived and misleading” and was only a ploy to promote the Chief Minister’s personal image. Peddapalli MP G Vivekanand, who is the son of former Union Minister G Venkataswamy, wrote to the Prime Minister, saying that the scheme was only an exercise in “window-dressing”.

The Telangana MP, along with his colleagues from the region, had urged the Prime Minister to cancel his trip. It was later announced that the launch of the programme has been postponed.

Under the scheme, the brainchild of the Chief Minister, over 800 training centers have been set up across the state to provide training for the unemployed youth for jobs in private sector. It is a modified version of “Rajiv Udyogsri” launched in 2007. According to original schedule, the Prime Minister was to distribute appointment letters to one lakh unemployed youth under the scheme.

However, Kiran’s critics within the party point out that there was nothing in the scheme for the government to take credit.

“The government is not providing any jobs. The training will make the youth eligible for some lower-level postings in private sector units. It is essentially a training programme being wrongly projected as a job creation scheme,” the MP said. The Telangana protagonists also raised objections over the way Kiran was resorting to “self-promotion” by christening the scheme in such a way that it contains his name. “This has adversely affected the image of the Congress and the state government,” Vivekanand said.

He also pointed out that a majority of the jobs being offered under the scheme were in the unorganized sector or small scale units such as cotton ginning units, stone crushers and raw rice mills.