The farmers of Amaravati capital region have been on the roads for the last 20 days in protest against the proposed shifting of state administration to Visakhapatnam by the YSR Congress party government led by Y S Jagan Mohan Reddy.
However, the state government employees have not yet opened up as to what they would do, if the administrative capital is shifted to Visakhapatnam.
They are aware that apart from state secretariat, all the administrative offices, heads of departments and state-level corporations would have to move to Visakhapatnam.
It would mean nearly four lakh employees, except those working with the state assembly and judiciary would have to move to Visakhapatnam.
In the last five years, they have been habituated to working in Amaravati, set up their families and houses in and around Vijayawada and Guntur and many of them have been shuttling between Hyderabad and Vijayawada every week.
All these days, the employees have not opened their mouth as any comment against the government’s decision might affect their service as it is against the service rules.
But on Tuesday, employees of the secretariat at Velagapudi held a meeting to discuss the problems arising out of the government’s decision to shift the administration to Vizag.
They asked their employees’ union leaders to take up the issue with chief minister Y S Jagan Mohan Reddy, since the shift would create huge problems for them. They wanted their leaders to tell Jagan that the capital change would upset their families.
The union leaders went to the chief minister in the evening but had no guts to raise these issues concerning the employees due to capital shift.
All that they did was to get their union calendar and diary released by the chief minister and return without talking anything about the capital change.
“Let the government announce its decision first. Then we have the reason to raise our issue,” a Union leader said.