Amaravati: State employees associations on Wednesday served a notice on the Andhra Pradesh government listing their agitation programmes demanding immediate redressal of their outstanding issues, including implementation of the Pay Revision Commission recommendations.
The AP Joint Action Committee and the APJAC Amaravati leaders met Chief Secretary Sameer Sharma at the Secretariat here and served the notice, expressing serious displeasure over non-fulfilment of assurances given to the employees.
"Only the government is to be blamed for this imbroglio. Though claiming to be a employee-friendly administration, the government so far remained indifferent to our issues," leaders of the two JACs Bandi Srinivasa Rao and Bopparaju Venkateswarlu said.
Talking to reporters after meeting the Chief Secretary, they claimed the state government owed at least Rs 1,600 crore to employees in the form of provident fund, general life insurance, leave encashment and other benefits.
Some of the major demands of the employees include release of pending dearness allowance, abolition of contributory pension scheme, regularisation of contract employees and village and ward secretariats staff, streamlining of employee health cards and hike in salaries of outsourced and other contractual staff.
"The government promised to take a call on implementing the PRC recommendations by October end but so far there has not been a word on it. It promised to resolve other pending issues by the end of November but that promise too remained unfulfilled," they pointed out.
Srinivasa Rao and Bopparaju said more than three years have lapsed since the PRC submitted its report but the government did not take any action on it except giving a 27 per cent interim relief to employees.
"The government so far did not even give us the PRC report. Does it contain any issues that should be hidden from employees? Contrary to tradition, the state Finance Minister never once discussed the PRC issue with the employees associations," the JACs leaders said.
"What the Finance Minister has been telling is total lies. He is only creating a wedge between the government and the employees," they alleged.
As per the agitation programme chalked out by the JACs, all government employees would attend work sporting black badges from December 7 to 10 in all offices, protest rallies in all taluks and revenue divisions on 13th, dharnas across the state on 16th, dharnas in all district headquarters on 21st and public conferences at Visakhapatnam, Tirupati, Eluru and Ongole from December 27 to January 1.
"We want the government to respond and resolve our issues before we step into the second phase of our agitation programme after January 6. We feel only the Chief Minister's intervention could break the deadlock," Srinivasa Rao and Bopparaju said.
