Jammu: Congress on Wednesday accused the Jammu and Kashmir government over alleged retrenchment of daily wage workers and casual labourers in the state, claiming the move will affect more than 61,000 families.
Congress Legislature party leader Nawang Rigzin Jora termed retrenchment, the "anniversary gift" of BJP-led NDA government.
"The promise of Ache Din by PM Narendra Modi is surely turning out to be bad days for the 61000 families of daily wage workers and casual labourers who are being retrenched from their jobs. This has come as anniversary gift to them," Jora said here.
He claimed that some departments have already terminated the service of daily wagers, while others are in the process of doing the same.
"The daily wagers who have not been disengaged as yet, continued to be deprived of their wages for the past two-and-half months or more," Jora said.
"It is a fact that most of these daily wagers and casual labourers have been engaged despite SRO 64 banning such engagements except in some critical sectors such as power, works, rural etc," the Congress leader said.
Despite the ban, the ground reality was that neither the NC government of 1996 -2002, nor the Congress-PDP coalition, nor NC- Congress coalition cared much for the ban and kept on engaging them with impunity... "in some cases like power and PHE such engagements were unavoidable", he said.
Jora added that the previous NC-Congress coalition did try very hard to regularise their services but with finance department refusing it, could not be done.
"At least we did not disengage them and continued their service. The present coalition which created so much hype and hoopla about huge flows of funds to the state under the PM, is hitting unfortunately the most vulnerable section of the society by depriving them of their livelihood by disengaging their services," he said.
Jora said that both Congress and National Conference suffered defeat in the last election because of "our failure to carry out regularisation of their services".
"The PDP-BJP coalition is better advised not to repeat our mistakes," he added.
