Telangana Panel to meet in Delhi on Thursday

Ahead of the launch of its consultation process, the Justice B N Srikrishna Committee on Telangana will meet here on Thursday to review the progress made so far and discuss responses received from various quarters on the separate statehood demand.

This is the third time the five-member committee will be meeting in the national capital since it was constituted by the Centre last month. It had met once in Hyderabad.

Panel's Member-Secretary Vinod K Duggal said the committee has received "overwhelming" response from various quarters, including individuals and various organisations, on the Telangana statehood issue.

"We have appointed some people just to read the responses. The response we have got is overwhelming.... We are happy (with the trend)," he said.

"We are planning to appoint some five to six dedicated people to see the responses and format them. We need dedicated people to sort out the overwhelming responses," Duggal said.

Earlier, many organisations had threatened to boycott the panel, but most of them have now reversed their decision and sent their views to the panel.

The committee plans to launch its consultation process with the general public and political parties from the first week of April and has announced that the hearings will be conducted in Hyderabad and other parts of the state.

Asked about the agenda of Thursday's meeting, Duggal said the meeting will review the progress made by the panel into the issue in the past one month.

The committee had already started researching on various aspects like historical, constitutional, political, legal, economic, social and cultural to give its view on the separate statehood issue.

The committee had also sought views and suggestions from political parties, associations and groups and civil society organisations on the vexed Telangana issue which has divided parties in Andhra Pradesh virtually on regional lines.

The committee has been mandated to "examine the situation in the state of Andhra Pradesh with reference to the demand for a separate state of Telangana as well as the demand for maintaining the present status of a united Andhra Pradesh".

Other members of the committee are Ranbir Singh, vice chancellor of the National Law University, Delhi, Abu Saleh Shariff, senior research fellow in International Food Policy Research Institute, Delhi, and Rabinder Kaur, professor at the department of humanities and social sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology-Delhi.

The committee has been mandated to review the developments in the state since its formation and their impact on the progress and development of different regions.