THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: With the harvest festival Onam approaching, there was speculation whether the nearly 28,000 employees of the Kerala State Road Transport Corporation ( KSRTC) will get their pending two months' salary. The good news is they will get it and Rs 100 crores have been sanctioned by the Pinarayi Vijayan government for the purpose.
This happened after Vijayan and the trade union leaders held discussions on the issue and it was brought to the notice of the chief minister that the families of the employees have lost all patience and things might get out of hand.
The decision to pay the salaries came with the condition that the employees' duty structure would change from a 16-hour double shift to a 12-hour single shift.
Presently the duty structure is such that each employee who does 16 hours' double duty gets a day off but according to the new condition this will no longer be applicable and it will be a single duty of 12 hours. If they work for another 4 hours that would be treated as overtime and will get them double the basic pay and dearness allowance.
But this new condition according to sources has not gone down well with the employees. To sort things out, the CMD of KSRTC Biju Prabhakar will now meet the officers.
For long the KSRTC has been leading a hand to mouth existence and every time the state government has had to step in to ensure that salaries are paid.
The KSRTC was set up in 1965 and it made profits only that year and since then it has been ending in the red. The accumulated losses have now turned into a mind boggling figure.
The general impression is that it is a white elephant on account of the highly unionised staff. Despite the best efforts of a few tough taskmasters as chairmen and managing directors, they were not successful in reigning in the unions and every year the KSRTC went from bad to worse.