AMARAVATI, 2 OCTOBER
Chief Minister Y S Jagan Mohan Reddy on Saturday launched Clean Andhra Pradesh (CLAP) under the Swachh Bharat Mission 2.0 to make the stategar bage and litter-free, with emphasis on visual cleanliness.At a p r o g r a m m e i nVijayawada, he flagged off about 4,000 new garbage collection vehicles for deploymentin various urban and rural local bodies. The state governmentis using funds under the 15thFinance Commission grant and also Rs 350 crore being col-lected from urban residentsas user charge (garbage cess) for the programme.The government is still working out the quantum ofgarbage cess to be imposedin rural areas, according to Panchayat Raj and Rural Development Minister P R C Reddy.
The government is supplying 1.20 crore coloured (blue, green and red) bins for40 lakh households in 124ULBs. The Swachh Andhra Corporation has also drawn up plans to set up 225 garbage transfer stations in the ULBs,where the primary waste collected from households will be compacted and sent tothe treatment plants.A sum of Rs 220 crore from the 15th Finance Commissiongrant will be used for this.Municipal AdministrationMinister Botsa Satyanarayana said 72 integrated solid waste management plants would be set up in the state underthe Public-Private Partner-ship mode.Telangana Congress leaders pay tribute to Mahatma Gandhi before launching agitation: Telangana police today thwarted plans of a massive agitation launched by the Opposition Congress by taking into custody several party leaders while state president Revanth Reddy was stopped from leaving his residencefor the 67-day long political programme which began onGandhi Jayanti.Youth Congress president BV Srinivas was injured in the fracas with police. Mr Reddy accused chief minister
K Chandrasekhar Rao of resorting to intimidating tactics to suppress the voice of jobless youths.T h e Co n g re s s h a dannounced a 67-day long agitational programme “Vidyarthi Nirudyoga Jung Siren”till 9 December demanding justice for students and unemployed youths accusing the TRS government of failing to tackle unemployment which wasa key demand during the statehood agitation. Earlier police took away the statues of Mahatma Gandhi and Ambedkar which the protestors were planning to put up at the protest site. Some Congress leaders also alleged that after the Governor left Bapu Ghat all celebrations were wound up preventing people from visiting the place during Gandhi Jayanti. A youth Congress member was also injured when he tried to commit suicide over the demands of jobs, claimed the party. They also alleged that police stopped the sale of tickets for Metro to prevent the Congress supporters from reaching the protest site.Mr Reddy said that the war bugle has already been sounded and the agitation will now spread to every corner of the state. Telangana Congress has witnessed a resurgence which is quite visible after Mr Reddy took over recently and has launched several agitations since then.After an argument withthe policemen deployed at the gates of his residence Mr Reddy accused the chief minister of behaving like the Taliban and wondered what was wrong in paying tribute to the martyr Srikanth Chary.He also demanded that the state government mustclear dues of fee reimbursement scheme and all the 1.91lakh job vacancies must befilled up. Also the state government should start paying the unemployment allowance with retrospective effect from December 2018 when Mr Rao had made the election rallies