Jammu: Police cane-charged protesting daily-wagers of the public health engineering (PHE) department and foiled their march to the civil secretariat in Jammu on Monday.
The daily-wagers are on a protest since Friday, demanding the regularisation of their services. On Sunday, they extended their strike by another 72 hours.
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Raising slogans against lieutenant governor Manoj Sinha, chief minister Omar Abdullah and the BJP, the daily-wagers managed to breach the first layer of barricades near the MLAs’ hostel. They ran towards the secretariat but a posse of policemen prevented them from proceeding further. The protesters who succeeded in removing the concertina wires and barricades were lathicharged.
“We are fighting for our rights, our survival. We have families to feed,” said Inder Parkash, one of the protesters. Another daily-wager, Mohan Singh, said, “We supply water to people and see how we are being beaten up.”
Last week, chief minister Abdullah formed a high-powered panel headed by chief secretary Atal Dulloo to look into the issue of the regularisation of the daily-wagers engaged in government departments across the Union Territory. The committee has been given six months to come up with long-term solutions.
Abdullah said the National Conference government is committed to ensuring speedy recruitment to fill vacancies in government departments of Jammu and Kashmir.
According to an estimate of the previous PDP-BJP coalition government that fell apart in June 2018, Jammu and Kashmir had 61,000 such workers engaged by various departments. To regularise them, the cash-strapped J&K government needed ₹1,925 crore annually.
