National Commission for Safai Karamcharis on Friday stepped in between Raipur Municipal Corporation (RMC) and Kivar Environ Pvt ltd over a payment related conflict for maintaining cleanliness in the city.
Kivar, which has been assigned an agreement with RMC for ‘Integrated City Sanitation and Municipal Solid Waste Management Project,’ has reportedly stopped the work a couple of days ago alleging that the civic body has not cleared some of it due payments.
However, the civic body officials were saying that no payment was due from their side.
“We have made complete payments to the company till May, this year and there was no payment due from our end. The company is mounting pressure on making the payments, which we had deducted as penalty for not finding the work satisfactory in recent past” said AK Malve, RMC Executive Engineer.
As a result, the contractual company reportedly failed to distribute salary among the sanitation workers, which forced the later to go on strike, further dilapidating cleanliness system in the city.
Meanwhile, the member of National Commission for Safai Karamcharis, Dr lata Om Prakash Mahato heard the grievances of sanitation workers engaged by RMC in a meeting held in Civil line situated Rest House.
She assured them of justice and filling the vacant posts of sanitation workers in RMC.
On the sanitation workers’ demand of cancelling the company’s contract with RMC, Mahato assured them of carrying out its verification.
The workers sought Mahato’s intervention to stop privatization of sanitation work, regularize the temporary workers, clear their seven months dues etc.
She informed the gathering about different government run schemes for welfare of sanitation workers including providing loan from Rs 50,000 to Rs 50 lakh on minimum interest rate for establishing own business and education loan for their children on zero per cent interest rate.
Mahato also informed the gathering of soon holding a camp to spread awareness about different government run schemes for welfare of the sanitation workers.
RMC Additional Commissioner, Dr JR Soni, Secretary of Chhattisgarh State OBC Commission, lR Kurre, Secretary of Chhattisgarh Schedule Caste Commissioner, HK Singh Uike and RMC sanitation workers were present in the meeting.
Meanwhile, after receiving many complaints of not lifting garbage and poor cleanliness across the city, RMC Additional Commissioner and the Acting Commissioner, Sanjay Agrawal held a meeting with all the zone commissioners to review the situation.
RMC Health Officer, Dr Shiv Sharma informed the meeting of making efforts to carry out cleanliness through their about 475 santitation workers.
To this, Agrawal asked all the zone commissioners of ensuring deployment of 100 santitation works in their respective zone for carrying out day-to-day sanitation work.
later, Agrawal held a discussion with the CEO of Kivar company, Manish Singh on the present situation and asked him to immediately start work.