Govt staff on state-wide protest

Madurai: Seeking revision of their dearness allowance (DA) that has been frozen at 17% and will not be revised till April 2022, thousands of staff and officials from state government departments staged protests and wore black badges on Monday to grab the attention of the Tamil Nadu government.

The Tamil Nadu government employees association (TNGEA) carried out demonstrations at various government offices in Madurai, Trichy and Coimbatore regions. The state government is supposed to increase DA whenever the Union government does, according to an agreement between the TNGEA and Tamil Nadu government when M G Ramachandran was chief minister.

State general secretary of Tamil Nadu revenue officials association, M P Murugaian said that the Union government that froze DA from January 2019 has announced revised DA at 28% from last month. But the state government has postponed it by eight months, due to which employees are losing around 10% of their salary for this period.

TNGEA Trichy district vice-president V Mohan said that this agreement has not been honoured this time by delaying the increase of DA. “Our association will decide on our next move in the executive committee meeting to be held in Erode on August 21,” he added.

The protesters also sought scrapping of the contributory pension scheme that is in effect from 2004 and introduce the old pension scheme. Their other demand included releasing the Rs 25 lakh compensation for the kin of frontline workers who died in the second wave of Covid-19.

Guru Tamilarasu district president of Tamil Nadu government all department pensioners association said that nearly 7.5 lakh pensioners across the state are affected by the frozen DA.

In Coimbatore, the protests took place at 15 places. Association's district secretary B Senthil Kumar and president Balraj led the protest in front of the district administration.