Telangana Cultural Council artistes again made to wait for salaries

Artistes, who played a vital role in the formation of a separate Telangana, have been facing troubles due to delay in payment of salaries.

Karimnagar: Delays in payment of salaries to Telangana Cultural Council artistes by the State government appears to have become frequent. In a fresh spell, artistes have not been paid salaries during the last four months.

A news item titled ‘No Salaries for Telangana Cultural Council Artistes’ was published in these columns on July 26, following which the government cleared April and May salaries to the artistes. However, their salaries are pending again since June.

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Artistes, who played a vital role in the formation of a separate Telangana, have been facing troubles due to delay in payment of salaries. The artistes, who are completely dependent on their salaries, said they were unable to sustain their families due to this. On the other hand, a manual attendance system has also become another problem for artists, who educate the people about the government schemes by conducting programmes in rural areas.

Earlier, they used to get attendance by uploading their programmes on a mobile app. They used to upload photos and videos on the mobile app as and when they conducted a programme in a particular village on a prescribed date. However, the current State government stopped the mobile app attendance system due to lack of signals in interior places and resumed the old manual attendance system from June.

Since all the artistes work under District Public Relations Officers, DPROs were asked to take attendance manually and send it to the government. Taking advantage of this, some of the DPROs are allegedly harassing artistes by deliberately delaying attendance.

These folk artists had kept alive the Telangana sentiment through their songs for nearly 14 years. Recognizing their services, the previous BRS government had provided jobs to 583 artists under Telangana Cultural Council and fixed the salary of Rs.24,514 to each artist per month. Though the Congress government announced that it would enhance the salary to Rs.32,000, the artistes have not been paid the enhanced salary so far.

Speaking to Telangana Today, an artist said that artistes were facing severe troubles due to pending salaries. Since all of them hail from poor backgrounds, they have no other means to support their families. Despite representations to Ministers, there was no change in the attitude of the government, he said.