Sans salary for 4 months, health workers seek Guv help

Tribune News Service

Jammu, July 20

Even as the previous PDP-BJP government had promised to find a permanent solution to their problems, hundreds of female multipurpose health workers are working without salary for the past four months.

Angry over the alleged non-fulfillment of the state government’s commitment, the workers have now written to Governor NN Vohra seeking his intervention into the matter.

“We have been assigned multiple tasks and we are doing them with all dedication but we are not paid regularly. Last year, we got our salaries in instalments, and that too after agitating for 37 days. After six months, the situation is virtually back to square one as we have not been paid for the past four months,” Nirmal Kumari, secretary general of the Jammu and Kashmir Female Multipurpose Health Workers’ Welfare Association, said.

She said, “On June 20 last year, we had a meeting with the then Health Minister Bali Bhagat wherein it was promised that concrete steps regarding salaries of 2,211 employees would be taken but nothing changed for us.”

She said they were smoothly running all major Centrally sponsored schemes in the Health Department but there were no promotional benefits for them. “We retire from the same post on which we get appointed,” she said.

Earlier in the morning, over 100 female multipurpose workers went to the state convention centre at Canal Road after they came to know about the proposed visit of BB Vyas, Adviser to the Governor.