Team Herald
MARGAO: Even as the South Goa Comunidade Forum has decided to contest the writ petition filed by the employees on payment of salaries, it was revealed that those currently working in the office of Administrator of South Goa Comunidades, have been illegally appointed.
Last year, Tukaram H Gaude and 26 others working in the Comunidade Administrator’s office at Margao, had filed a petition against the government demanding that they be paid their salaries which were not paid to them from May 2016.
The High Court in an interim order directed the State government to pay the petitioners one month wages.
However, in an interesting twist Advocate General S D Lotlikar submitted before the court that the appointment of the petitioners is “not in accordance with law and as such the question of paying any salaries to the petitioners would not arise”.
He further submitted that the concerned comunidades are obliged to pay the salaries and not the State government.
Following this stand taken by the Advocate General, which is a reflection of the government stand, the petitioners have now amended the petition to add 90 comunidades as respondents due to which a meeting was called on Friday to decide upon the next plan of action.
It would be pertinent to point out that the comunidades have for years now been saying that the staff has been illegally appointed and that they should not be paying their salaries as they are not doing comunidade work but are more involved with government work and hence the government should be paying their wages.
It was decided that all 90 comunidades will challenge the petition, with the well-to-do comunidades financing the financially defunct bodies.
Significantly, a provision of Rs 1.20 crore was made towards the salary of the staff for the current financial year which is now expected to go up to Rs 1.5 crore, with the new pay commission scales coming into force.
It was also revealed that only two posts of UDC are sanctioned for the office of the Administrator of Comunidades, and the other employees are either of the post of LDC or not sanctioned at all. Representatives of comunidades present at the meeting pointed out that most of the staff do not work at all with some of them reporting for work only for a couple of hours and then disappearing.
“The staff in the Comunidade Administrator’s office are all political appointees,” was the consensus, and hence it was decided not to pay them any wages from the income of the comunidades.
