With the salary date nearing, the employees at the Government Medical College, Ernakulam, are again at their wits end.
The Head of Account opened for the medical college getting no better than the Rs. 1,000 allocated in the Budget supplementary presented two weeks ago, the employees are making a guess where their next salary is going to come from.
A senior official in the medical college told The Hindu that salary would be delayed this time too. The Finance Department is yet to approve the Rs. 60-crore proposal by the Health Department.
The Cooperative Academy for Professional Education that was managing the college till the government decided to take over in December last year had been paying the salaries to the employees with the government promising to reimburse the amount when budgetary allocations are made.
An amount of Rs. 5 crore was recently made available through a loan from Kerala Medical Services Corporation Ltd. towards paying salaries and other expenses that CAPE had been meeting so far. As the amount got transferred rather late, the salary for June was paid on July 18.
Both the doctors and the staff are waiting with bated breath for the Cabinet decision on August 6 that is expected to provide the framework for integration of the medical college with the Directorate of Medical Education.
Minister for Health V.S. Sivakumar, Minister for Cooperation C.N. Balakrishnan and the PWD Minister V.K. Ebrahim Kunju are expected to thrash out a formula for integration that had been dragging for long.
The permanent staffers at the medical college are worried that their service with the organisation for the last 13 years will go unrecognised during the integration process if all the category of employees are integrated at one go. The permanent staff, the contract workers and daily-wage staff needed to be considered on different planes, said a college staffer.
There were indications that quite a few doctors might leave the institution if the long years of work there was not considered, said Dr. Jacob Baby, the president of the Cochin Medical College Teachers’ Association.
