Don’t crack the whip on us, say BBMP staff

Bengaluru: Members of the public who were seeking civic services at the BBMP offices, were dismayed to have to turn back as the BBMP employees went on strike and stayed away from work on Thursday.

Services like paying property tax, supplying birth and death certificates, were affected. The strike followed a bandh call by the BBMP employees’ association, which alleged high-handedness by the BBMP administrator T. M. Vijay Bhaskar.

Hundreds of BBMP staff and members of BBMP Employees’ Association staged a protest against administrator T.M Vijay Bhaskar for suspending 9 officials in the last few weeks. They alleged that the administrator had suspended the officials without even issuing show cause notices and had a turned blind eye to the grievances of BBMP staff.

Speaking to Deccan Chronicle, Amrutraj, an employee, said, “There is a severe staff crunch in the civic body and every employee is expected to carry out the work of eight people. In such a scenario, how can the administrator think one person can do all the work by himself in the stipulated time?”

Sources said that nine workers were suspended for dereliction of duty. While one worker in the Accounts department was suspended after he failed to clear cheques to the tune of Rs 50 crore, another had transferred Rs 60,000 to a contractor’s account, though the money was deducted by the agency as tax.

In their defence, the employees said that they were very new to online transactions and since all the payments to contractors were made online, they needed more time to adapt to the system.

“The higher-ups expect us to be updated and work according to their expectations. How is it possible? We are not trained to work using advanced technology and there are no guidelines. Hence, errors do happen. We should be trained and given some more time to learn before the administrator decides to take stern action against inadvertent errors,” he said.

The workers demanded that all the suspensions be revoked and that the officials should be reinstated.