Chief Minister Omar Abdullah on Tuesday announced the formation of a committee to address the issue of regularisation of daily wagers in Jammu and Kashmir and said that a roadmap will be prepared for presentation in the next budget session before the House. The Committee will be headed by the Chief Secretary and will include the Additional Chief Secretary in the Chief Minister’s Office, along with the Secretaries of the Planning, GAD, and Law departments as members. He said that the the committee has six months to thoroughly review the number of daily-wagers through GAD and assess the legal and financial aspects of their regularisation.
Abdullah’s announcement came as the Assembly was rocked by protests over can charging of protesting daily wagers by Police. On Monday, daily wagers and adhoc employees of Jal Shakti Department took to streets in Jammu and Srinagar protesting against non-payment of wages and demanding regularisation on their services as promised by the ruling National Conference in its election manifesto.
While Abdullah distanced his government from the cane charging by the Police, saying Police is not under his control so the question should be posed to the Raj Bhawan, he admitted that the successive governments, including his, in the past have failed these daily wagers big time and promised that steps would be taken to resolve the issue as it is ‘more humanitarian than financial.’
The regularization of daily wagers in Jammu and Kashmir has been a contentious issue, with the government facing criticism for its inaction. Despite a 2007 high court order directing the regularization of daily wage workers who had served between 14 to 19 years in the rural development department, governments, that be, delayed taking ant concrete action. The Supreme Court recently slammed the J&K government for its failure to comply with the high court order, stating that the case was a “textbook example of government authorities considering themselves to be above the law”. The court noted that the government’s inaction was “shocking and prima facie contemptuous” and imposed a fine of Rs 25,000 on the authorities.
There are nearly 60,000 daily wagers and casual labourers working in different government departments from years together without any job guarantee thus their fate hanging in balance. The issue highlights the systemic problems in the state’s administration regarding workers’ rights. In December 2017, then J&K government formulated an SRO for regularization of such employees but failed to do anything except regularizing the services of just 570 such employees out of above 60,000. Later, the said SRO too was scrapped under the J&K Reorganisation Act two years ago, closing the door for regularization.
Now that a high level committee has been formulated regarding this pressing issue, it is high time that the present dispensation does the needful. 60,000 daily wagers, their families and the entire populace of Jammu and Kashmir is watching. Let the commitments made to this section of the society during elections be upheld and let this committee come up with concrete road map within stipulated time and government resolve the issue once for all.