Jayalalithaa raises home loan ceiling

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In a move that could cheer state government employees, chief minister J. Jayalalithaa on Saturday increased the housing loan ceiling and medical insurance cover for government employees.

Considering the increase in construction material costs, the government had decided to enhance the housing loan ceiling for government employees from Rs 15 lakh to Rs 25 lakh and from Rs 25 lakh to Rs 40 lakh for those deputed on Central government service.

This will have retrospective effect from April 1, 2012, Ms. Jayalalithaa said in a release here on Saturday.

Also, in the case of the Chief Minister’s Comprehensive Medical Insurance Scheme, now, the government had decided to extend the scope of the scheme to cover additional 61 ailments and surgical procedures.

The scheme is being implemented through the United India Insurance Company and covers about 52 ailments and surgical procedures.

With this, the insurance scheme would now cover a total of 113 medical conditions and surgical procedures.

Hence, each member of the scheme would now have a medical insurance cover of Rs 4 lakh, up from the Rs 2 lakh as permissible earlier.

Subject to the upper limit of Rs 4 lakh, the government staff and his/her family members could undergo treatment any number of times.

This will benefit about 13.50 lakh government staff, noon-meal organisers, village assistants, employees of state government undertakings and universities coming under the state government among others and their families.

Ms Jayalalithaa had launched the scheme at an outlay of Rs 750 crore.

State proposes to fine-tune music college infrastructure

Students learning music at the government colleges will soon be greeted with better infrastructure and good musical instruments.

The state government has proposed to improve the institutions and provide new musical instruments for its music colleges across the state.

According to sources, during 2012-2013 fiscal, the government would provide furniture at a cost of `5.1 lakh, besides musical instruments would be purchased at a cost of Rs 5.1 lakh.

“We have planned to take up massive awareness campaign for admitting students to the district government music schools,” an official said.

He said the entire exercise of improving the infrastructure was to ensure qualitatively better education to students.

Also, the old musical instruments in the government music colleges would be repaired. On the cards is to provide a computer lab for the government music college at Tiruvaiyaru and equip it with audio-visual equipments. The district government music schools would also be equipped with new musical instruments.

It has been proposed to organise exhibition of famous artistes at Chennai, Madurai, Coimbatore, Tiruchy and Tirunelveli this fiscal. The department of art and culture is making arrangements for the conduct of these exhibitions.

On the declining interest among the younger generation towards pursuing music as a profession, an official said the campaign proposed to be launched would address this issue and encourage the youngsters to pursue music.