Vijayawada::
On a bandh day, students from Guntur, Vijaywada, Machilipatnam in Seemandhra meet at a top engineering college. The reasons for the meet and their restlessness are apparent. Since the passage of the Andhra Pradesh Reorganisation Bill by the Lok Sabha in a controversial way, their future seems uncertain.
20-year-old Praveen almost broke down when he was asked 'what next for him'. The final year BTech student will pass out of college in two months, but Hyderabad where he did an internship last year, he says, will seem like foreign territory.
"You think my parents will be ok to send me now to another state where the situation is so hostile? Forget me, will girl students be allowed? And if you are here, where are the jobs and companies," he asks.
The highest recorded placement so far in colleges in Seemandhra is no more than 56 per cent. That is simply because there are only five IT companies in the entire region.
Mounika, a computer science engineer, says like her, the batches for the next few years will be the worst hit due to the split.
"We should learn a lesson from this. Development should be all over. No use of putting everything in one city and at the end not being able to bear the fruit," she says.
Hyderabad, which is in the Telangana region and the area around it is home to reputed institutes like Birla Institute of Technology, IIT, NIT, ISB, IIIT.
Vijaywada and Guntur in the Seemandhra region too have over 200 engineering colleges but most are new. Some students on either side admit competition is healthy, but they question if the government will be able to give an ironclad assurance that no indifference will be meted out to youngsters on either side.