Casual labourers employed in gram panchayats across the State have planned to march to Vidhana Soudha and stage a demonstration outside. Addressing mediapersons on Monday, Maruti Manpade, president, Karnataka Stage Gram Panchayat Employees’ Union, said around 30,000 of the total 60,000 workers employed in over 6000 GPs across the State were expected to participate.
The inclusion of 18,000 workers left out of Panchatantra Electronic Fund Management System (EFMS) because of the lack of educational records would be among the main issues raised. “We welcome the government initiative to introduce EFMS for transparent fund management and payment to the workers. Over 60% of the workers have already been brought under the EFMS. However, around 18,000 workers are left out as they failed to produce records pertaining to their educational qualifications. These are the employees who have been working as pump-operators, sweepers, bill collectors, data entry operators and clerks for minimum wages for over a decade now. Considering the nature of their jobs and the age of employees, the government needs to rethink and allow them to continue in their jobs that indeed require no educational qualifications,” Mr. Manpade said.
Mr. Manpade said these employees had not received their wages for the last eleven months owing to this.
“These employees are working for minimum wage and their families are dependent upon them. One can imagine the financial crisis their families are undergoing by the fact that they have not received their wages for the last eleven months. Hope Rural Development and Panchayat Raj Minister Krishna Byre Gowda understands the problem and resolves it at the earliest possible,” he said.
Other demands included restoration of the process of promoting all those bill collectors who passed Class 10 and completed 10 years of service to Gram Grade-2 secretary positions, introducing pension, medical facilities, gratuity and other benefits, completion of the process of drafting service terms for workers, upgrading Grade-2 GPs to Grade-1 GPs as per 2011 census and creation of additional positions in GPs considering the size of the population.
