Angered by Telangana Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao's “dictatorial” attitude towards the striking Telangana State Road Transport Corporation (TSRTC) employees, 32-year-old conductor Lunavath Krishna, employed in the Suryapet district bus depot, wrote a scathing open letter to the CM and offered his resignation on Wednesday.
In his letter, Krishna dubbed KCR as a traitor for deceiving them. “We workers realized a bit late that you make false promises and use manipulative words to deceive us. That is the reason I am resigning before you can fire us," Krishna wrote.
Krishna is one of the 48,000-odd TSRTC employees who went on strike for 26 demands, including merging the transport corporation with the government.
He further wrote that he never dreamt that there would be a dictatorship in Telangana. "When 1,200 people died [during the Telangana agitation for a separate state], I thought that KCR was a saviour and it was the leaders from Andhra Pradesh who deceived us. But, when you failed to respond to the suicide of 30 of our workers, that's when I realized that Telangana was not achieved for us, but for leaders like you. I never imagined that my sisters would be brutally beaten with lathis, but in your Golden Telangana that became a reality," he said.
Furthermore, he added that he couldn’t work in the TSRTC at the cost of his self-respect, and asked the Chief Minister to be accept the resignation letter with immediate effect and give him the money that is due to him.
Krishna, who belongs to a Scheduled Tribe, joined the RTC in 2009 and earned nearly Rs 16,000 per month after all the deduction. Because of this, he actively participated in the 52-day strike called by the Joint Action Committee (JAC) of the TSRTC, which is a union of . employee unions.
The JAC had called for a strike on October 5, with 26 demands including merger of the Corporation with the government, which would essentially mean that the TSRTC would avail the same benefits as the government employees. But, the government rejected their demands. The employees then called off the strike and said that they won’t get back to work, but the management refused to accept them.
Speaking to TNM, Krishna said that he was disappointed, and wrote an open letter because he was not allowed into the depot when he went to submit his resignation letter.
“I was extremely disappointed with the harsh words of TSRTC Managing Director Sunil Sharma. Besides, the Chief Minister kept threatening us that he would remove us from service. Fed up with this constant threats, I wanted to resign. But when I tried to give the resignation letter at the depot, the police didn't let us in. That's why I wrote this open letter and shared in WhatsApp groups," he says.
Though Krishna doesn't have another job, he says that the job of the conductor wasn't any good to regret.
“I completed my graduation, and now will have to look for odd jobs to sustain my family,” he says, with a sigh of helplessness.
Krishna's anger against CM KCR stems from the meagre salary he earned. He is a father of two, and has elderly parents to take care of.
“I don't have any other source of income. My children’s education costs Rs 35,000 annually, and each month, Rs 2,000-3,000 goes towards the medical expenses of my parents and Rs 3,900 towards rent. With this meagre salary, I couldn't sustain my family. We often would borrow Rs 5,000 each month, which we would repay after taking a huge loan of Rs 60,000 from a co-operative society. This became a cycle," he says.
"It became a cycle. We didn’t get any benefits when we went on strike and even when we went back to work, they shooed us off,” he lamented.