The Hindu : Andhra Pradesh News : Hyderabad liberation: pension for 4000 more freedom fighters

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Jan 14, 2005

Andhra Pradesh

Andhra Pradesh

Hyderabad liberation: pension for 4000 more freedom fighters

By Our Special Correspondent

NEW DELHI, JAN. 13. The Union Cabinet today approved granting of pension to additional 4,000 persons for the Hyderabad Liberation Movement under the Swatantrata Sainik Samman Pension Scheme.

The beneficiaries will also get dearness relief and 50 per cent of the pensioners the facility railway passes.

The financial implication for the scheme would be Rs.20.74 crores per annum, the Union Information and Broadcasting Minister, S. Jaipal Reddy, said.

Under the liberalised scheme, a relaxation was made that in the event of unavailability of official records, a freedom fighter could furnish certificate from a prominent freedom fighter who had himself suffered imprisonment for not less than two years.

The proposal will benefit 2,400 applications whose cases were rejected earlier on account of their not belonging to the approved list of 98 camps and also those applicants whose verification reports were yet to be received from the Andhra Pradesh Government.

KCR thanks Centre

Briefing separately, the Labour Minister, K. Chandrasekhara Rao, thanked the Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, the Union Home Minister, Shivraj Patil, and the United Progressive Alliance Chairperson, Sonia Gandhi, for responding to the request from various representatives of the region and resolving the problem pending for a decade.

Mr. Rao said the movement for merger of Nizam State into Indian Union was held between March, 1947, and September, 1948. In 1985 the Union Cabinet approved sufferings in the camps set up on the borders of the Nizam State for grant of pension.

A committee was set up under Govind Shroff that identified 98 camps in Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Maharashtra and with the number of participants being 11,000.

In 1996, the committee recommended cases of about 7,000 participants and later another committee under C.H. Rajeshwar Rao added 18 camps and 13,500 cases.

The UPA Government decided to recognise these 18 additional camps during July last year.

Recommended

Mr. Rao said between July, 1985, and May, 1998, 62,500 cases for pension were scrutinised of which 41,995 rejected and the rest 20,505 recommended.

He said as of November last year, out of about 9,080 reports received from the State Government, 9,058 were examined.

Of them, 3.500 cases were accepted, 3,644 rejected and 1,914 cases sent back to the State for clarifications.

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