Collector Santosh Calls for Youth to Follow the Ideals of Bhagya Reddy Varma
Gadwal: District Collector B.M. Santosh emphasized that every individual should work diligently to fulfill the ideals and vision of social reformer Bhagya Reddy Varma. On Thursday, the Collector paid floral tributes to a portrait of Bhagya Reddy Varma as part of his birth anniversary celebrations held in the premises of the District Collectorate.
Speaking on the occasion, the Collector described Bhagya Reddy Varma as a great visionary who recognized that education was the key to progress and took significant steps to eliminate social inequalities. He highlighted that Bhagya Reddy Varma was a pioneering leader who established schools for Dalits, aiming to instill self-confidence and provide them with opportunities for a better future.
'He worked tirelessly for the education and empowerment of Dalit girls by setting up dedicated schools for them, thereby showing them a path to a dignified life,' the Collector noted. He added that Varma fearlessly opposed social evils like untouchability and the Devadasi system, striving to bring about positive change in society.
Calling on the present generation, especially the youth, the Collector urged them to walk in the path shown by Bhagya Reddy Varma and become active participants in social transformation. He further stated that the district administration is committed to ensuring that all eligible citizens receive the benefits of developmental and welfare schemes effectively.
Several dignitaries and officials participated in the program, including Additional Collectors Lakshmi Narayana and Narsinga Rao, RDO Srinivasa Rao, Agriculture Officer Narender, BC Welfare Officer Ramesh Babu, SC Welfare Officer Saroj, and representatives from various caste-based community associations.
The event was marked by respect, reflection, and renewed commitment toward social equality and educational empowerment, echoing the legacy of Bhagya Reddy Varma.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Hindu
2 days ago
- The Hindu
Maximum UG seats filled in first-round counselling at Govt. Arts and Science college in Coimbatore
: Most of the seats for undergraduate programmes in the Government Arts and Science College (Autonomous), Coimbatore, were filled in the first round of counselling. As on Wednesday, 1,405 seats out of 1,727 were filled. All seats in Computer Science, Information Technology and Psychology have been filled, and only limited vacancies are available in all other science courses, college sources said. Admission for 322 vacancies that remain to be filled will be carried out on Friday, under Phase III of the first round of counselling. The college has informed that vacancies in arts and commerce courses will be filled only with students who had taken up vocational group in Plus Two. In Phase II schedule of admission counselling that began at the start of this week, the cut-off marks fixed by all departments, except English and Tamil, were 270 to 299 on Monday, and 240 to 269 marks on Tuesday. On Wednesday, the admission was carried out for BC and MBC candidates, with cut-off marks of 55 to 74 for Tamil and 50 to 59 for English. Likewise, in the Government Arts and Science College for Women at Puliakulam in the city, only top-scorers among the applicants could find themselves in the reckoning for admission. For instance, top-ranked candidate for Computer Science Shift-I had an aggregate score of 390. There were as many as 2,087 applicants for an intake of 50 seats. For Shift-II, the top-scorer had an aggregate of 385 marks. There were a total of 889 applicants. For Shift-I, the other course in demand, the top-scorer had an aggregate of 394 marks. The aggregate was 391 marks by the top-scorer in Shift-II.
The Hindu
3 days ago
- The Hindu
Rank allocation of 15,000 candidates on hold due to absence of intermediate marks, says APEAPCET Convener
Andhra Pradesh Engineering, Agriculture & Pharmacy Common Entrance Test (AP EAPCET) 2025 Convener Prof. V.V. Subba Rao on Tuesday announced that ranks of 15,000 candidates have not been alloted due to non availability of their Intermediate marks. However, these candidates have qualified the APEAPCET. In an official release, Prof. Rao said, 'The ranks of those waiting for Intermediate supplementary results will be released once the results are out. The candidates of ICSE, CBSE and Diploma courses will have to wait for their ranks until the release of results'. These candidates will be allowed to register their marks on the AP EAPCET website from June 11. 'There is no need to be panic,' Prof. Rao advised parents of the candidates whose rank is on the hold. The candidates can register their grievance by contacting helpline numbers 0884-2359599, 2342499 or write to helpdeskapeapcet@
Indian Express
3 days ago
- Indian Express
The Kilvenmani massacre: When 44 Dalits were burned alive in one of India's earliest caste-based atrocities
During a field visit to Kilvenmani in 2020, a thirsty Deivendra Kumar A recalls asking an elderly woman for drinking water. Her response stayed with him. 'Neenga enna aalunga, neenga enga kitta thanni kudippeegala? (What caste are you? Will you take water from us?)' the woman asked. The question struck Kumar, then a Master's student at a nearby university, for multiple reasons, but mainly because this Tamil Nadu village was the site of one of independent India's earliest and most severe instances of caste-based violence. More than half a century after that fateful day in 1968 when 44 Dalits were burned alive in Kilvenmani, Kumar A realised that little had changed in the remote village in the agriculturally rich Nagapattinam (earlier part of Thanjavur) district on the east coast of Tamil Nadu. In his 2023 article in the journal Economic and Political Weekly, titled 'In Memory of a Charred Village', Kumar A evokes powerful imagery of a hut which has been turned into a memorial. Adjacent to it is a new memorial called Manimandapam, with 44 carved pillars and raised fists representing the martyrs, he notes. But what happened in 1968? Who were the 44 victims of caste-based violence? Why was caste discrimination still prevalent in a newly independent India? And what was the aftermath of the violence? In the 1960s, landlord oppression was prevalent in Thanjavur. Among most districts in Tamil Nadu, Thanjavur had the most skewed land ownership trend at the time. A 1973 article in the Economic and Political Weekly, titled the 'Gentlemen Killers of Kilvenmani', notes that since 1961, 3.8 per cent of cultivating households in the district held more than 25.88 per cent of the cultivated area while 76 per cent held only 37 per cent of the area. Thanjavur reportedly had a high number of landless labourers: for every 10 cultivators, there were at least nine labourers. Among the landless, Harijans formed the bulk. 'It was here that feudal serfdom had fully developed,' the article noted. During the 1940s, the Communists became active in the village and associated themselves with the Dalits, as per the article. By the 1960s, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) had successfully mobilised them, most of them agricultural labourers in Kilvenmani, to demand higher wages and resist the oppression of the feudal, upper-caste landlords. Author and academic Elisabeth B Armstrong, in her 2014 book Gender and Neoliberalism: The All India Democratic Women's Association and Globalization Politics, highlights how women from Kilvenmani also joined the growing leftist women's movement. Together, Dalit men and women challenged what she calls 'established traditions of social oppression, labour exploitation, and sexual predation'. However, in 1966, upper-caste landlords under the leadership of Gopala Krishna Naidu founded the Paddy Producers Association (PPA). Naidu was one of the most powerful landowners in the area and owned estates in Kilvenmani and several neighbouring villages. The PPA helped bring labourers from outside Kilvenmani, replacing local labourers who were demanding salaries above the minimum wage. 'The landlords' pent up anger, frustration and inability to reconcile themselves to the Harijans' new found identity found expression on December 25, 1968…,' notes the 1973 article. On December 25, 1968, a landlord in Kilvenmani hired labour supplied by the PPA to punish local labourers, who had gone on strike multiple times demanding higher wages. The atmosphere was quite tense. Eyewitness accounts record that on the same evening, a tea-shop owner was kidnapped by the landlords and beaten up for refusing to advise the labourers to join the PPA. Enraged, the labourers forced the release of the man. In the conflict, an agent of one of the landlords was killed. The mirasdars (large landowners), according to Armstrong, sought revenge. At 10 pm that night, the landlords and their men arrived in police lorries and surrounded the Dalit neighbourhood from three sides, cutting all escape routes, she says. 'They shot at the Harijans with guns, attacked them with sickles and sticks and set fire to their huts. Several Harijans were hurt, two very seriously. Some women, children and old men ran and took refuge in one of the huts. The murderers immediately surrounded the hut, and set fire to it,' she cites. The next morning, 44 bodies were recovered. In her 1999 book Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age, UK historian Susan Bayly noted that all the Kilvenmani victims were rural labourers belonging to the Harijan community. In contrast, among the 200 attackers reportedly involved in the violence were some of the richest landowners of the area. While mainstream media portrayed the incident as a wage dispute, according to Armstrong, locals suggested that the violence was fuelled by upper-caste anxiety over the growing militancy of the agricultural workers and their defiance of caste-based practices. 'The suggestion that it was simply the wage issue…was meant to cover up the underlying cause of the agrarian trouble that had attracted even judicial notice,' noted the 1973 article. In his 2017 book, Dalit Women: Vanguard of an Alternative Politics in India, scholar and writer Anand Teltumbde notes: 'These atrocities were unleashed by collectives of the dominating castes on collectives of the Dalit in a celebratory mode, not as punishment for specific contraventions of the caste code…' 'The role of the left women's movement was as critical in Kilvenmani,' notes Armstrong. Women's committees in the Communist Party of India produced some powerful women leaders, as seen in the protests that followed the Kilvenmani massacre, she says. 'These same Dalit women active in the agricultural workers' union of the Thanjuvar district created the backbone for the Tamil Nadu Democratic Women's Association (DWA) when it formed in 1974,' says Armstrong. In the founding convention of the Tamil Nadu DWA in 1974, she further notes, Dalit women activists from Thanjavur constituted half of its membership of 27,000 women. However, with the 25 accused in the murder case, including Naidu, being acquitted, the alleged role of the bureaucracy and local administration in refusing to act against the upper castes had become increasingly evident. According to Teltumbde, the 'extreme caste-class prejudices of India's judges' had been apparent since the Kilvenmani massacre. According to the 1973 Economic and Political Weekly article, 'The evidence did not enable Their Lordships to identify and punish the guilty'. The 'Gentlemen Killers of Kilvenmani' article notes how the (Madras) High Court ruled that it was beneath the dignity of the landlords to stain their hands with the blood of the lowly; such an act, they reasoned, was inconsistent with their social standing. A man who owned 'extensive lands,' and 'a car,' the court opined, could not possibly be so insensitive. 'In brief, gentlemen farmers will also be gentlemen killers,' the article reads. Although relegated to the pages of history, the Kilvenmani massacre remains one of independent India's first and harshest caste-based violence. The memorial at the village honours the lives lost and also stands as testimony to how justice was denied to the victims. Ironically, not much has changed in Kilvenmani even today. 'Kilvenmani is caught in a time capsule, where most of the villagers are landless,' Kumar A notes in his article. Nikita writes for the Research Section of focusing on the intersections between colonial history and contemporary issues, especially in gender, culture, and sport. For suggestions, feedback, or an insider's guide to exploring Calcutta, feel free to reach out to her at ... Read More
