Jagan defaults on salaries for volunteers!

Yet another classic example to show how AP CM YS Jaganmohan Reddy makes tall claims while announcing new schemes or initiatives of YSRCP government, but fails miserably in their implementation.

Jagan’s brainchild “Grama/ward volunteer’ system, received a jolt as the state government failed to pay the salary for volunteers after recruiting them more than two months ago on August 15.

Jagan recruited thousands of grama/ ward volunteers to take government schemes and services to the people’s doorsteps.

He launched the initiative, considered to be the novel concept in the country, on August 15 amid much fanfare.

However, after completion of more than two months, the volunteers did not receive their salaries.

Moreover, the volunteers were overburdened with work as nearly half of the vacancies are yet to be filled.

With this, the existing volunteers were asked to do the work in places where volunteers were not recruited. Officials promised that they would get a double salary if they do additional work.

After completion of two months, let alone getting a double salary, they did not receive even a single salary so far.

The tight financial condition of the AP government is said to be the reason for not paying salaries.

Jagan failed to pay salaries even in his home district Kadapa.

Worse still is Jagan is finding ‘lame excuses’ to remove volunteers from their jobs.

In Kadapa, out of 1,400 volunteers, only 800 got salaries.

Initially, the government recruited those having age up to 35 years.

Now, they are being sacked from the jobs saying that they are too old to work at the age of 35 years.

Why did they recruit 35-year candidates in the first place and why they are removing them in an abrupt manner? There is no answer from the YSRCP government to this question.

Poor volunteers are running around collector offices to get their salaries.

They are standing in queues along with common people to give representations to collectors during “Spandana” programme being held every Monday to receive public grievances.

If this is the situation after recruiting only half of the total volunteers, one can easily imagine how the things will turn worse after all the volunteers are appointed.

Already several volunteers left their jobs due to work burden. They are kept busy with various surveys from morning till evening.

With this, volunteers feel that the meager salary of Rs 5,000 per month they get does not match with the amount of work they do and are leaving the jobs midway in search of better jobs.