Sharmila’s record-breaking padayatra from today

Daily, she will walk for four hours in the morning and three in the evening

YSR Telangana party chief Sharmila will seek to break all records in padayatras by walking 4,000 km in 400 days when she sets on her second walkathon to mobilise public support for a welfare State through her nascent political party from Chevella on Wednesday.

She will look to better her own record of walking 3,112 km in 230 days through her `Maro Praja Prasthanam’ yatra in 2012-13 and that of her brother and Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Y.S. Jaganmohan Reddy who created history with his 341-day Praja Sankalpa Yatra that covered 3,648 km and billed as the longest in the country.

The twin yatras by Ms. Sharmila and Mr. Jagan overshadowed their father Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy’s Praja Prasthanam of 1,500 km in the scorching summer of 2003 and Telugu Desam president N. Chandrababu Naidu’s 2,000 km yatra in 2012. An 11-day bus yatra by Ms. Sharmila in support of YSR Congress of Jagan prior to 2019 Assembly and Parliamentary elections in 2019 had also received good response.

Ms. Sharmila has adopted the same name of her late father’s yatra and also the same centre — Chevella — to kickstart the walkathon that will cover 90 Assembly and 14 Parliamentary constituencies of Telangana. She will walk for four hours in the morning and three in the evening everyday. She will also undertake hunger strike every Tuesday in the interval between her walking spells to highlight the unemployment problem in the State.

She is launching the padayatra within one hundred days of launching her party. She held hunger strikes across the State to highlight unemployment and visited families that lost breadwinners due to the indifference of government to resolve the problem. While both Ms. Sharmila and Mr. Jagan commenced the padayatra in the past from Idupulapaya in Khammam district after paying homage at the grave of their father, the former chose Chevella as the venue to reminisce YSR yatra. A public meeting will be held before she sets off on walk.

Ms. Sharmila will walk 10 km on first day and gradually increased the distance. She had walked 13 km and addressed several interactions with village communities to know public pulse. Party leaders said she would hold similar meetings with local leaders and public this time round also in the evenings.

Accompanied by her mother, Ms. Sharmila visited the grave of her father on Tuesday to pay tributes.

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