In Uttar Pradesh, half of 2016 will be holidays

 

A senior official in the general administration department said, “The politics of holidays has almost wreaked havoc with the work culture in the state. Apart from 52 saturdays and 52 sundays, every employee is entitled to 30 days of earned leave, 14 days’ casual leave and also medical leave. Besides holidays like Holi, Diwali, Republic Day, Independence Day, Moharram, Ugadi, Janamashtami and Eid lead to extended leave if they get clubbed with weekends.”

 

The Akhilesh government has further added to the list of holidays by announcing ten more holidays this year. These include holidays on the anniversaries of Sardar Vallabh Bhai Patel, Chandra Shekhar, Acharya Narendra Dev, Karpoori Thakur, the birthday of Prophet, birth anniversary of Maharana Pratap and on Chhath festival. The birth anniversaries of Maharishi Kashyap and Maharishi Nishadraj Jayanti have also been declared a holiday along with the annual ‘urs’ of Hazrat Ajmeri Garib Nawaj at Ajmer. Most of these holidays have been declared on request by various caste groups, majority of them representing OBC groups.

 

A former chief secretary said that the politics of holidays was destroying the work culture which, in any case, needed drastic improvement. “Uttar Pradesh is known for the laid back approach of its employees and the red tapism that impedes progress. The abundance of holidays will only serve to add to this. As chief secretary I had faced these problems when the five-day week system was introduced. Most of the employees would start leaving office after lunch on Fridays and they would get into the work mode from Monday afternoon which means that out of seven days in the week, we were working for only four days,” he said.

 

The retired bureaucrat suggested that the state government must revert to six-day working and strictly enforce working hours if it wants to improve the image of the state. A senior minister, meanwhile, defended the government’s decision to the announced holidays at the drop of a hat. “For every leader or philosopher, we cannot build memorials and statues so we announce a holiday on his birth anniversary which gives an immediate sense of gratification to the community to which he belongs,” he said and added that despite surplus holidays, UP had made progress in the past three years.