BMC employees without Aadhaar denied salaries

Are you a government official without a unique identity (UID) card? Get one soon or else you will receive a financial jolt. And 20,800 Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) staffers will tell you how true that is.

Due to lack of UID card, the staffers from various departments have not received their salary for the month of December 2012.

“The salary was stopped as per instructions from municipal commissioner Sitaram Kunte and additional municipal commissioner Manisha Mhaiskar. The staffers in question had not shown any interest in getting their cards despite being instructed about it time and again,” said a senior civic official.

In August 2011, as per the state government’s directive, BMC had issued a circular instructing its employees to register themselves for the card. Despite having allotted a year’s time to get the cards, the circular received poor response. The period to register for the Aadhaar cards was later extended by four months. Eventually, BMC stopped salaries of those employees.

According to another senior civic official, the employees can get their salaries by merely registering themselves for the card. “If they have registered for the cards, but have not received the same, they can still get their salaries by substantiating their registration for UID with their respective establishments,” he said. With several employees not taking the national programme of Aadhaar card seriously, the decision to stop their salaries is a good one, he added.

However, the circular has started a debate in civic corridors, with Municipal Mazdoor Union chief Sharad Rao terming the corporation’s decision as ‘illegal’. “They cannot stop salaries of employees like this. We are moving industrial court in this regard and will recover the salaries along with interest from the civic body,” Rao said.

The BMC, considered as the largest local governing agency in the country, has 1.11 lakh employees and spends an average of over Rs300 crore per month to pay their salaries.