Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation office in Bhubaneswar. Telegraph picture

Bhubaneswar, Oct. 3: Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation (BMC) now depends mostly on casual and contractual workers for sanitation, healthcare and office management jobs because of staff crunch.

While many casual workers are being paid a meagre Rs 3,090 to Rs 3,480 per month for the last 15 years, a regular employee gets a minimum of Rs 13,000 a month for a similar job.

This disparity in pay structure has left casual workers unhappy. The Puja season has further added insult to their injury. While regular employees are entitled to a Puja advance of Rs 10,000, the contractual staff are denied any such benefit.

“I am doing the work of three junior clerks for the last 15 years but my salary remains stagnant at Rs 3,480. But several permanent staff are getting paid 10 times more than us for doing far less work. It is really shocking and during Puja we feel the discrimination more,’’ said a BMC employee, who did not want to be named.

Of BMC’s 2,406 employees 1,001 are regular. Of them, 700 are sanitation staff (sweepers) while the remaining 301 are available for administrative and official work. To overcome staff shortage, a large number of nominal muster roll, daily labour roll and contractual labour roll staff are engaged to ensure smooth work. All these 1,405 contractual employees shoulder the major burden of carrying out daily civic work.

“And then there is a vacancy of 357 regular posts. Therefore, if one adds 284 staff on daily labour roll with the official employee strength, the number becomes 800. However, it includes skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled workers. While an employee on the permanent payroll gets 10 times the salary of a skilled employee on the daily labour roll, the latter is contributing the same quality of work for years for a meagre salary,’’ added the BMC staff.

On the other hand, 71 nominal muster roll employees were engaged in sanitation and 262 daily labour roll staff in conservancy cleaning. However, the contractual labour roll workers are a major concern for the civic authorities said deputy municipal commissioner Priyadarshi Mohapatra.

Mohapatra added: “Apart from the 357 vacancies, a majority of the senior employees will retire in two years. So we have to make a quick assessment of regular unskilled and contractual skilled workers.” He admitted that many contractual workers were more efficient than the regular staff but they get far less salary.

With rapid growth in population, the city may have 70 wards in another four years. Therefore, the biggest challenge before the civic body is capacity building of both regular unskilled and the contractual skilled workers.

“With the civic body becoming bigger than 150 sqkm with the inclusion of five more villages from three panchayats such as Patrapada, Tamando and Paikirapur, BMC is going to take help of more staff to ensure smooth operation,’’ Mohapatra said.

“The civic body cannot make all contractual staff regular at one go as it involved several official issues. There could be an eligibility test to check the efficiency of both regular unskilled and contractual skilled workers. We have adopted many measures and these workers can now be trained in information communication technology (ICT),’’ the BMC deputy commissioner added.

However, casual and contractual workers are not happy with the pace at which things are moving. They claim that a circular is in place to regularise contractual staff appointed before April 12, 1993, but the state government is yet to issue a notification. “We know that if we stop our work for seven days the civic body cannot function. But the authorities are not eager to resolve the matter,’’ said a senior contractual employee.

The deputy commissioner, however, clarified that there should be a proper benchmarking of the staff quality. “We know that the organisation cannot sack old employees nor can it regularise all contractual staff. Therefore, efficiency will always be a criteria,’’ said a senior BMC official.