Sanitation Workers Not Paid For Four Months: BJP

Bharatiya Janatha Party senior leader Gudur Narayana Reddy today demanded that the State government take steps for the immediate release of the salaries of the sanitation workers of the various gram panchayats.

He said that the salaries of the sanitation workers were not released for the past four months, and even though the workers had been staging protests for the release of their salaries, there was no response from the government.

He said that a dalit sanitary worker had even committed suicide recently as he did not get paid for the past four months. Most of the families of sanitation workers were on the verge of ruin, he added.

He said that most of the panchayats got meagre revenues through property tax which was not enough to meet their monthly expenditures. They were mostly dependent on Central Finance Commission funds and the matching grants of the State government.

But the state government was diverting the funds being given to the GPs by the Centre through the Finance Commission, and so the gram panchayats were unable to pay the salaries of the sanitation workers as they did not have any funds left with them, he said.

He claimed that the Centre had released Rs 3,500 crore to the zilla parishads, mandal parishads and gram panchayats of Telangana in December 2022. And the State government was supposed to distribute the funds among the local bodies according to the officially fixed ratios.

"However the State government diverted these funds to its treasury and did not release them to the rural local bodies. This has led to a funds' crisis in the GPs. The sarpanches have taken up development works spending lakhs of rupees from their own pockets, and had planned to get the expenses reimbursed and pay the salary through the FC funds. But the government has not been paying the bills for months together," Reddy lamented.

He asserted that the State government was solely responsible for the non-payment of salaries to the sanitation workers for the past four months, and warned that any further delay in paying the salaries would lead to deaths in the families of the sanitation workers.

He criticized the Pananchayat Raj minister for being concerned more with praising and defending the Chief Minister and his (the CM's) family members than taking care of his department.