Christian sanitary workers staged a protest demonstration against the lack of manpower and absenteeism of the Muslim sanitary workers outside the office of Chairman, Municipal Corporation (MC), on Saturday. Due to the protest and the boycott of work by the workers, the city presented a shabby look because of the heaps of garbage and overflowing severs.
President Mutahhida Christian Council, Aakash Shahzad, also joined the protestors. Addressing the protestors, Supervisor, Shamoon Masih, said that the Muslim sanitary workers did not do the job and the whole responsibility to clean the city lied on the Christian sanitary workers. He said that only Christian sanitary workers, sixteen in total, could not clean the entire city.
Nasir Mahtab, another sanitary worker, complained that the Muslim sanitary workers regularly took their salaries without doing any work. He alleged that the former Member Provincial Assembly, Karam Daad, hired these Muslim sanitary workers for political gain and the matter was not resolved in the last five years by the district administration. Rehmat Charagh, another worker, said that there were 40 ghost Muslim workers who never came to the work.
The protestors demanded that all the ghost workers must be immediately called to work or they should be fired from the jobs and other sanitary workers should be hired to eliminate the shortage of sanitary workers in the city. They said that they already wrote to the district administration but no action was taken.
The sanitary workers warned that they would completely boycott cleaning the city if their demands were not met by the district administration.
When Assistant Commissionaire (AC) Jahanian, Hussain Khalid, was asked about the matter, he said that he was recently posted in Jahanian and the matter just came to his notice. He said that the Deputy Commissioner (DC) Khanewal, Ashfaq Ahmad, wrote to him about the matter and he would submit his report within three days.
Published in Daily Times, August 19th 2018.
