MADURAI
As part of their State-wide protest on Wednesday, around 450 of the 600 village assistants working in Madurai district went on a mass casual leave to highlight their long-pending demand for implementation of regular time scale.
The village assistants, who are members of Tamil Nadu Revenue Department Village Assistants Association, also staged a demonstration at Madurai Collectorate.
S. Mariappan, district treasurer and State propaganda secretary of the association, blamed the government for “betraying the village assistants by paying them lesser salary” by including them under a ‘special time scale’ instead of the regular time scale.
“We are supposed to get a basic salary of ₹ 15,700. However, we are getting only around ₹ 13,000 now,” he said.
“Village assistants are overworked since they are involved in a wide range of activities involving different departments such as health, revenue, disaster management,” he said, adding the paltry salary did not justify the amount of work they perform.
The protesting workers demanded revision of pension as well. According to them, while pension of various cadres of employees in the revenue department is fixed as a percentage of their salary, the village assistants are paid only a fixed amount of ₹ 2,700 per month. “We want this to be revised to 50 % of our salary,” Mr. Mariappan said.
The other demand raised by the village assistants was increase in bonus for Pongal festival from ₹ 1,000 to ₹ 2,000 on a par with other employees in similar cadre.
