Delhi goes ahead...with tagging buffaloes and using poor biometrics to deny wages to municipal employees.
Pradeep Kumar
Pradeep Kumar
THE 37-YEAR-OLD and his buggy are a common sight in Govindpuri. He has been a non-permanent MCD employee for 16 years. Every morning, he hits the streets with his buffalo and cart, picking up piles of garbage. He shares a garbage bin with Ganesh Mandal and for his efforts the MCD is supposed to pay him Rs 5,850 a month.
“The buggywallas of Govindpuri have not been paid for six months,” says Kumar. “Our income may have stopped but there is no end to our expenditure. I spend close to Rs 4,400 on the upkeep of my buffalo every month, plus I have to send my three children to school, put food on the table, and run my household. How are we supposed to survive? Whenever we approach the local officials, they tell us they are looking into the matter.”
MCD officials, however, claim all sanitation workers are being paid regularly.
In order to increase productivity, the MCD has installed biometric scanners. Attendance is taken through fingerprints and buffaloes are tracked through GPS devices.
“They forcibly put the device (GPS tracker) into our buffalo. They said that those who don’t have it installed can’t work,” he says. “They took something that looked like a sawed-off shotgun, placed it in the buffalo’s mouth and fired. They told us the device would settle inside the animal, but of the 14 buffaloes that had this done, five have died. They never came to check our animals, the owners received no compensation for their animals’ deaths. The animal belongs to us, not the government. So when it dies we have to buy another buffalo, which costs Rs 30,000.
“They forcibly put the device (GPS tracker) into our buffalo. They said that those who don’t have it installed can’t work,” he says. “They took something that looked like a sawed-off shotgun, placed it in the buffalo’s mouth and fired. They told us the device would settle inside the animal, but of the 14 buffaloes that had this done, five have died. They never came to check our animals, the owners received no compensation for their animals’ deaths. The animal belongs to us, not the government. So when it dies we have to buy another buffalo, which costs Rs 30,000.
“I am lucky because my wife works as a sweeper in a school, so we are able to make ends meets. Others have been forced to take loans with interest rates of 10-20 percent. How they will pay them back I don’t know.”
While the safai karamcharis of Govindpuri suffer every day, the private tractor trolley hired by the local authorities to collect garbage gathers dust and rust outside a local park.
It seems bizarre that the government can spend Rs 1.5 lakh on a fingerprint scanner, Rs 40,000 on a GPS tracker and Rs 40,000 a month on an unused tractor but can’t give Kumar his wage of Rs 5,850.
