As many as 1 lakh voters would have something personal at stake on Sunday. The staff of two municipal corporations would not only be voting as residents of Delhi, but also as employees waiting for their salaries for the month of March.
Employees of the East Delhi Municipal Corporation (EDMC) and North Delhi Municipal Corporation have been getting salaries a month or two late because of a financial crisis that worsened in the last two years. Along with the South Delhi Municipal Corporation (SDMC), the EDMC and the North Corporation have a total of about 1.6 lakh employees.
According to officials, as on Friday, the March salaries for category A and B employees of the North Corporation and all staff of the EDMC had not been disbursed.
For Kamlesh, a safai karamchari of the North Corporation working in Saraswati Vihar, late salaries have become the norm. “The salaries come in the middle of the month. It is difficult to run a household on ₹8,000 a month, and that too gets delayed,” she said, adding that despite having worked with the corporations since 1998 she had not been given a regular post.
While the SDMC has been able to stave off a cash crunch, it too has not been able to give permanent jobs to employees.
Meagre salaries
A contractual worker with the SDMC at Najafgarh said he had been waiting for 17 years for a permanent job. He added that as a contractual worker there was more pressure on him to perform compared to permanent staff.
Another worker, Parmod Kumar, said that the lack of facilities and a meagre salary of ₹7,000 a month was not enough.
“Every year my contract is renewed, for which I have to make rounds of the Civic Centre [SDMC’s headquarters]. We are not even entitled to pension,” he said while painting signs at a polling station for Sunday’s elections.
Earlier this month, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal had promised that the AAP would regularise temporary workers if it comes to power in the corporations.
But for many workers, the problem of late salaries started after the AAP came to power in 2015.
The principal of a North Corporation school said that salaries for the Education Department staff had been delayed by a month, and that the problem started with the coming of the AAP government.
