Thiruvananthapuram corporation staff work on holidays too

Thiruvananthapuram: Officials at the Corporation's pension section were working on Tuesday, a government holiday as a tribute to Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa's demise. In order to complete the data entry of the social welfare pension forms, the section worked on Sunday too. The office also had data entry operators from Kudumbashree. Now, that may not agree with the stereotyped image of government officials portrayed as callous procrastinators. But there they were, furiously typing in details from approved self-declaration forms, so that beneficiaries would get their pension well before Christmas.

The data entry operators were all daily wages officials. One of them, 19-year-old Sandhya S has to board two buses to reach the Corporation office at 10 am. She has been working as a data entry operator at an Akshaya centre, to support her family. Her mother is a domestic help. She has enrolled for a long-distance degree course in sociology, but her only dream is to get a permanent job.

In all there were 14 people working at the Corporation on Tuesday. This included three Kudumbashree data entry operators, as well as the data entry operators hired to handle the data of various standing committees. They had completed data entry of over 22,000 forms, out of 49,000 forms received. The pension section was requested to work on holidays, as on other days, they would also have to answer pension-related enquiries, according to Welfare Committee Chairperson Geetha Gopal.

Some of the officials tried taking home work, but they stopped it as the website into which the data had to be entered was running too slow. Even as everyone is diligently working, some wonder aloud why the government changes policies so often. "Now it is self-declaration forms. Before that there was the Kudumbashree survey and the post office system. We are the only constant," said one.