IAS

Akunuri Murali

Telangana

dalit

Brahmin

Seniorofficerhas applied for voluntary retirement from service. He is due to retire next year but chose to seek VRS. He is currently serving as a commissioner of the archives in thegovernment.Thebureaucrat feels discriminated in postings and treatment. When contacted, he told Mirror, “Of course it is a protest resignation. There is discrimination in postings and treatment.” He further added, "There is discrimination in all states and it is more here (in Telangana)."He said he has not been happy with the work assigned to him. “There is no work. It is just drawing salary without work. I felt quitting is better (than continuing),” he said.Murali, popular among dalit sections as an officer with concern for social sections and sensitive to issues, said he would work in his favourite area of education.Murali was met with controversy on two separate occasions when he was serving as the Bhupalpally district collector in 2017.During the peak of the beef movement in March 2017, Murali addressed a public meeting on TB eradication at Eturunagaram. He called upon the people to happily eat beef (pedda koora in Telugu) or wild boar meat to be healthy. Referring to some dalit senior citizens in Mahabubnagar and Rangareddy districts suffering from weakness, he said that people used to be healthy when they were eating beef.“Many of them told me that they want to eat beef but are neither served outside nor allowed to eat at home,” he revealed to the audience.He termed the beef ban as nonsense and said it was imposed by the Brahminical system. Severalorganisations later lodged complaints against Murali, who later apologised for having hurt the feelings of some sections.In the same year, Murali became controversial among mandal parishad (block) development officers for reportedly admonishing them in objectionable language during a video conference on individual sanitary latrines.