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Thursday, June 2, 2011

MR employees at Agriculture and Horticulture Deptts gherao head office, protest tardy progress on regularisation

GANGTOK, 01 June: When around 200 Muster Roll employees of Agriculture and Horticulture Departments from all the four districts arrived in the office of the Principal Director, SK Sinha, at around 11 a.m. here at Krishi Bhawan today, a heated exchange broke out and the Director eventually left his office claiming that he had some work outside. The MR employees were upset with the tardy progress on the regularization of their services by their headquarter. The MR employees of the two Departments decided to gherao the headquarter to place their grievances to the senior officials face-to-face.
When they found that the Secretary was on tour with the Chief Minister, the employees decided to meet the Principal Director.
One of the demands, as placed to Mr. Sinha, was that, one-time relaxation be given to Class XII [Humanities] passed MR employees to fill 97 posts of VLWs lying vacant with the Department. According to the Departmental norms, the posts can be filled by the candidates having Class XII passed with Science stream.

The employees argued that the Department already has VLWs and even higher ranked officials, who do not possess even matriculation certificates.
On this, Mr. Sinha said, “The Department had made mistakes in the past, but during my tenure, I don’t want to repeat same mistakes. No relaxation from my side will be allowed,” saying so, he left his office.
Seeing his attitude, the employees became furious and entered the office of another Principal Director, P.T. Bhutia.
Here, the employees were informed that the regularization will be possible, if the posts are available.
On this, one LDC informed that some years back, the Department had regularized some senior MR LDCs even in the absence of any posts.
“They were regularized as Office Helpers and the Department does not have any such designated post. If this can be done, why not for us,” she asked.
With this new finding, Mr. Bhutia became astonished and assured that he will verify how it was done in the past.
Those who are working in the field in remote villages as Field Assistants informed that they have to cover more than eight GPUs single handedly as all the senior officials have been promoted and their posts are lying vacant.
They demanded that with the years of experience behind them, they are handling the duties of seniors and asked what was the problem for the Department to regularize them.
“If the Government sincerely wants to make Sikkim a fully organic state by 2015, the Department must regularize us,” said a Field Assistance from Dodok in West Sikkim, who is working as Field Assistant on MR for the last 20 years.
Hearing the grievances, the Principal Director assured that he will discuss the matter with the “higher authorities”. But he suggested that the matter be put up with the administrative sections, as they were the competent authority to deal such matters.
When the mob entered the chamber of the Additional Secretary, and placed their demands, she said that the availability of posts will be decided by officials from the technical division.
“We will process the files as per the direction of the officials from technical division,” she said.
The group finally entered the chamber of the Director, Topchen Lepcha, where it was cleared that the list of around 700 MR employees belonging to Agriculture and Horticulture Departments was still not ready. Whereas, the Animal Husbandry Department, whose office is located in the same building, had already notified the lists of all the 494 MR employees as per the seniority on its notice board.
The Director assured that an amicable solution will be sorted out after the notified seniority list of MR employees of the Department will be published.
He also enquired why the final list was not ready yet. His subordinates informed absence of proper documentation on the part of the employees had delayed the work. He further directed the lists be prepared immediately.
He also suggested that the employees meet the Secretary who will be in the office on 07 June. The employees decided that all the 700 employees of both the Departments will meet the Secretary on that day.



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