Many complications AP Government Nandi Awards

The United Andhra Pradesh governments used to award prestigious Nandi Awards to the big and small screen industries for their phenomenal work annually. Post bifurcation, the question raised who would be giving these awards. But as there were so many more important things to settle post bifurcation – like apportionment of the assets and liabilities between the states, allocation of individual employees to either of the states and many other issues to be settled as bifurcation was done in a hurried manner, governments as well as industry people did not bother on Nandi awards. But later things settled down and both states expressed their stand on Nandi awards.

AP government stated that it will continue Nandi awards for Telugu films and TV, even though the film industry is not in AP state. Meanwhile, Telangana government also stated, that they will also give awards, but name will not be Nandi, and they will have a new name for these awards. Also it clarified that the awards will be given to individuals and works of all Telugu people irrespective of which state they belong to – TS or AP. The TS govt. has in fact set up a committee to finalize a name for their state film awards and the name of ‘Simha’ has reportedly been recommended by the committee. Reportedly, TS government also planned to give this awards on Dusshera every year (unlike on every Ugadi by AP ). But this was almost one year back and after that no update from TS government. It would be really interesting to see if both the governments give the awards to see which government will give to whom. In fact it is a rare scenario for a regional language film getting awards from 2 states.

But there is one more interesting development in this dimension. Now AP announced Nandi awards and Telugu states witnessed unprecedented controversy and debates on these awards. Even though announcement of Nandi awards attracted controversy many a times, the aspirants always blasted jury members and presented their memorandums or requests to the government. But this is the first time, people from the TFI came forward and directly giving sarcastic statements on AP government or even directly rebuking AP government. It seems root cause for this also lies in the bifurcation. Usually film industry people try to be in the good books of the government. But because of bifurcation, entire TFI is now present in TS state and they have not many stakes in AP state. So they are not at all fearing to attack the government. Some analysts question TFI guys- “if TS governments give film awards and if they are disappointed, will they have similar guts to attack KCR”. We don’t know the answer but we can definitely say, TFI being in TS, definitely made some paradigm shift in TFI folks with respect to AP government.

We have to wait and see if TS government really goes ahead on the proposal of announcing film awards and how it would be when it does so!!!