MYSURU: Nearly 4,000 contractual staff with the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee (MGNREGA) scheme have not been paid for the last five to seven months.
Though the staff, who are responsible for creating employment in rural areas under the programme, have approached top officials and appealed for the payment of pending salaries, nothing has been done.
The staff that have not been paid include engineers, Information, Education and Communication (IEC) workers and field staff.
With no sign of salaries, they have resorted to a protest and applied for mass casual leave, boycotting work. They have also staged demonstrations in front of zilla panchayat offices across the state. The tragic story is the same even in Mysuru, the home district of Chief Minister Siddaramaiah.
These coordinators are crucial in ensuring that the rural folk get 100 days of employment per year under the scheme.
Rural Development and Panchayat Raj Minister Priyank Kharge has written to Union Rural Development Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan for urgent intervention for the immediate release of pending wages, material and administrative funds to ensure livelihoods of lakhs of scheme beneficiaries and maintenance of administrative efficiency.
The lack of funds has affected routine operations, supervision and ground-level implementation.
Kharge stated that pending bills amounted to Rs 787 crore, while wage liabilities totalled to around Rs 600 crore.
While the government has set a target of creating 1.5 lakh mandays per month and around 3.5 lakh mandays in a few districts of North Karnataka, the strike by MNREGA staff will upset these targets.
The IEC staff create awareness, upload documentation of the work executed, while engineers inspect the work, and check quality before bills are raised.
An engineer, pleading anonymity, said they have worked without salary to ensure that the rural workers and the programme itself is not affected. “How can we feed our families when we have no other source to fall back on,” he asked.
IEC coordinators said they could not go on field visits and show progress for the last few months as they had run out of funds. They blamed lack of coordination between the central and state governments as one of the reasons for the delay in releasing funds.
Mysuru Zilla Panchayat CEO S Umesh Kumar said they have asked the striking staff to return to work, hoping that the government might release salaries. The strike should not hamper the awareness programme, development works and creation of jobs, he added.