No pay for months, Karnataka NREGA contract staff on protest leave

MYSURU: Nearly 4,000 contractual staff with the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee (MGNREGA) scheme have not been paid for the last five to seven months.
Though the staff, who are responsible for creating employment in rural areas under the programme, have approached top officials and appealed for the payment of pending salaries, nothing has been done.
The staff that have not been paid include engineers, Information, Education and Communication (IEC) workers and field staff.
With no sign of salaries, they have resorted to a protest and applied for mass casual leave, boycotting work. They have also staged demonstrations in front of zilla panchayat offices across the state. The tragic story is the same even in Mysuru, the home district of Chief Minister Siddaramaiah.
These coordinators are crucial in ensuring that the rural folk get 100 days of employment per year under the scheme.
Rural Development and Panchayat Raj Minister Priyank Kharge has written to Union Rural Development Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan for urgent intervention for the immediate release of pending wages, material and administrative funds to ensure livelihoods of lakhs of scheme beneficiaries and maintenance of administrative efficiency.
The lack of funds has affected routine operations, supervision and ground-level implementation.

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