Hyderabad: Telangana Chief Minister K. Chandrashekhar Rao on Sunday request PM Narendra Modi to name Hyderabad Central University after former Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao.
The demand came on a day when the chief minister launched year-long birth centenary celebrations of Narasimha Rao.
The chief minister, in a letter to the Prime Minister, stated that there is a strong local public demand in Telangana to name the university after Narasimha Rao.
He requested the government to name the institution as PV Narasimha Rao Central University of Hyderabad.
KCR, as the chief minister is popularly known, wrote that this would be the fitting tribute to Narasimha Rao during his birth centenary year. He recalled that the university was set up in 1974 because of Telangana agitation at that time under the six-point formula to address the imbalance in education infrastructure in Telangana.
The former Prime Minister was born in Telangana on June 28, 1921. “Although he is famously recognized as a leader who ushered in economic reforms to bring the stagnant economy of India on a trajectory of high growth at a time of unprecedented economic crisis in 1991, he was at the same time a multi-faceted son of India who contributed the growth of our nation in several other crucial spheres,” reads the letter.
KCR also noted that Narasimha Rao’s contribution to education policy and setting up of residential schools first at the state level and later in the form of Navodaya Schools at a national level was a radical step to provide quality education to meritorious students from rural areas with poor economic background.
The University of Hyderabad
The University of Hyderabad is a public research university located in Hyderabad, Telangana, India.
Founded in 1974, this mostly residential campus has more than 5,000 students and 400 faculty, from several disciplines. The Governor of the state of Telangana is ex-officio the Chief Rector of the University, while the President of India is the Visitor to the University.
The university was established along the lines of the Six-Point Formula of 1973. The first Vice-Chancellor of the University was Banaras Hindu University organic chemist Gurbaksh Singh, from 1974 to 1979. Shri B D Jatti was the first chancellor of the University.
In January 2015, the University of Hyderabad received the Visitor’s Award for the Best Central University in India, awarded by the President of India.
The university is in Gachibowli, on 2300-odd acres. The campus is rich in flora and fauna, home to over 734 flower plants, ten species of mammals, fifteen species of reptiles, and 220 species of birds.
The University is recognized as an Institute of Eminence (IoE) by the University Grants Commission (UGC)
P V Narsimha Rao
Pamulaparthi Venkata Narasimha Rao (28 June 1921 – 23 December 2004) was an Indian lawyer and politician who served as the 9th Prime Minister of India from 1991 to 1996. His ascendancy to the prime ministership was politically significant in that he was the second holder of this office from a non-Hindi-speaking region and the first from Southern India. After the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi. He employed Dr. Manmohan Singh as his Finance Minister to embark on a historic economic transition. With Rao’s mandate, Dr. Manmohan Singh launched India’s globalization angle of the reforms that implemented the International Monetary Fund (IMF) policies to rescue the almost bankrupt nation from economic collapse.
Rao’s term as Prime Minister was an eventful one in India’s history. Besides marking a paradigm shift from the industrializing, mixed economic model of Jawaharlal Nehru to a market-driven one, his years as Prime Minister also saw the emergence of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a major right-wing party, as an alternative to the Indian National Congress which had been governing India for most of its post-independence history. Rao’s term also saw the destruction of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh when BJP’s Kalyan Singh was Chief Minister, which triggered one of the worst Hindu-Muslim riots in the country since its independence.
Rao died in 2004 of a heart attacks in New Delhi. He was cremated in Hyderabad.