The Andhra Pradesh government on Monday requested the Centre to confer the Bharat Ratna, India’s highest civilian award, on renowned playback singer S P Balasubrahmanyam, who passed away in Chennai on Friday due to post-Covid-19 complications. Andhra Pradesh chief minister Y S Jagan Mohan Reddy wrote a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi recommending the name of Balasubrahmanyam, popularly known as SPB, for the highest civilian award of the country.Stating that Andhra Pradesh was fortunate to be the birthplace of the great singer, Jagan said the untimely demise of SPB had caused a lot of distress to millions of fans across the country and also the international music fraternity.
“SPB’s immense popularity and the deep impact he had left on the global music industry in his 50 years of legacy can be gauged by the continuous flow of rich tribute from music aficionados all over the world,” Jagan said.The chief minister said SPB’s achievements had gone beyond music and he had lifted compositions to sublime levels. He has sung over 40,000 tracks in his mother tongue Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam and Hindi and had won innumerable awards including six national film awards, 25 Nandi awards of Andhra Pradesh and numerous other awards. He was a recipient of the Padma Shri (2001) and Padma Bhushan (2011) from the Government of India. He reminded the Centre that in the past, music stalwarts like Lata Mangeshkar, Bhupen Hazarika, M S Subbulakshmi, Bismillah Khan and Bhimsen Joshi, were conferred with the Bharat Ratna award by the Government of India.“As a tribute to the legendary singer for his outstanding contribution in the field of music and art, I request you to confer the Bharat Ratna upon SPB. This will be the highest recognition to his remarkable work which lasted for 5 decades and will stay in our memory forever,” Jagan said.