8 yrs on, wife of pilot killed with YSR awaits government help
HYDERABAD: A lot was promised to Kiranmayi Reddy when she was grieving her husband’s death eight years ago. She is still waiting for the promises, among them a Group-I job and a residential plot, to be kept.
On September 2, 2009, her husband, Captain MS Reddy, 45, was among the two pilots who died along with then Andhra Pradesh chief minister YS Rajasekhara Reddy and two others in a Bell 430 helicopter crash. The chopper crashed in Nallamala forests of Kurnool district in inclement weather. The government promised Kiranmayi a job of the rank of revenue divisional officer, a 500-sq yard plot in Hyderabad and aid for education of her two children, Vinay Kumar, who was then in Class 11, and Manusri, who was in Class 8.
“None of these promises has been fulfilled so far,” Capt Reddy’s younger brother M Venkata Ramana Reddy, told HT. “All that my sister-in-law got from the government was ₹10 lakh, which was also paid to kin of all the others who died in the crash. Nothing more,” he added.
Kiranmayi, a postgraduate in commerce, started teaching in a private school as she battled the odds to raise her children.
Her perseverance paid off as she managed to send Vinay to the US for studies and put Manusri in medical school. Her brother-inlaw Jagadeeshwar Reddy, once a government employee, has been chasing bureaucrats for years to get the government to keep its promises. Along the way, officials told her that Capt Reddy was not a regular employee of the Andhra Pradesh Aviation Corporation and was hired on contract after his voluntary retirement from the Indian Army in 2008. They said this rendered her ineligible for appointment on compassionate grounds, according to Jagadeeshwar. “After relentless follow-up, the government issued orders for providing her the job. We got an order for relaxing the age for appointment and a no-objection certificate from Andhra Pradesh Public Service Commission exempting Kiranmayi from appearing the Group-I services exam,” said Jagadeeshwar. “The final hurdle was to get an amendment made to AP Public Services Act by the state assembly, giving clearance to her appointment.”
Then the file got stuck with the Telangana statehood movement picking up momentum and paralysing the state administration for four years, according to Jagadeeshwar. When Telengana state was finally carved out of AP, the division of administration saw the file remaining untraceable for months. “We managed to retrieve the file and got it transferred to Telangana government because we hail from Nalgonda. It is now stuck again in the CMO,” said Jagadeeshwar.