Fatehabad municipal workers protest against Chief Sanitation Inspector

Municipal Council employees in Fatehabad held a protest on Saturday against the Chief Sanitary Inspector (CSI), accusing him of forcing council workers to lift garbage despite a private firm being awarded a multi-crore waste collection contract.

The protest, organised under the banner of the Municipal Employees’ Union, saw workers shouting slogans against the CSI and announcing that they would neither work on Sundays nor lift garbage from dumping points.

A general house meeting of the union was held under the chairmanship of unit president Naresh Rana, with secretary Omprakash Lot conducting the proceedings. The employees alleged that Sunday holidays had already been cancelled under the guise of the Swachh Bharat campaign. If any worker took a leave on another day instead, they were marked absent, which they called unfair and exploitative.

The union leaders said workers were angry over the inspector’s “disrespectful behaviour” toward sanitation staff and supervisers. They claimed that despite the municipal council awarding a multi-crore contract for door-to-door waste collection and garbage lifting at dumping points to a Kurukshetra-based firm, the CSI continued to issue orders directing municipal employees to perform the same work, a move the workers alleged benefitted the contractor directly.

The employees also objected to new orders mandating eight hours of daily work for sanitation staff. They pointed out that under the Sanitation Service Act, the official workday was limited to six to seven hours. “This order is completely unjustified,” one union representative said.

During the meeting, the members unanimously decided that no sanitation worker would report for duty on Sunday. The union warned that if their demands were not met by Monday, they would escalate their protest into a full-scale strike and take to the streets. “The municipal administration will be solely responsible for the consequences,” the employees said in a joint statement.

Senior state and district union leaders, including Ramesh Tushamad, Begraj, Vijay Dhaka, Omprakash Jhalania, Satyawan Tank, Veeru Ratti, Amit Gill, Pawan Chindaliya, Dheeraj Goghlia, and Shakuntala, attended the meeting and supported the protest action.