Owais Ayoub
Srinagar 09 March (KNB): The Community Information Centres (CICs) operators working in the Rural Development Department of J&K have for around 17 years kept from being regularized and claimed that their cases were cleared from time to time, but nothing worked on the ground.
172 CIC operators, who have been performing their duty from 2004, claimed that only 10,000 rupees are given to them monthly, which does not help them meet the expenditure of their daily lives and is also affecting their family members thereof.
“Despite being the MCA, M.Sc IT, B.E, B. Tech/M. Tech qualified and handling all the programmes of Rural Dev. Panchayati Raj, both online as well as offline, we are being subjected to a callousness of the administration because our demand for regularization is pending for years now,” said one of the CIC operators on the basis of anonymity.
Pointing to the administration’s stalling of the process, they said that the Jammu & Kashmir Government had in 2014 passed a Cabinet order to formulate a proposal for the regularizations of 172 CIC Operators in the Rural Development Department J&K.
They further added that the J&K Government had, through its cabinet decision, created 172 Data entry operators for regularization in 2016, and later Principal Secretary, Finance Department J&K headed the Empowered Committee during which their cases were cleared for regularization.
While contacting Secretary for Rural Development & Panchayati Raj, Sheetal Nanda, regarding the issue, she said that the regularization is not covered under any norms. “They (CIC Operators) are all contractual employees, and competent authority had not approved their regularization,” said Nanda.
On asking the question of forwarding the 172 CIC operators’ regularization file to the competent authority, she said several times she had done it.
However, on asking another question, she dropped the call and did not respond. (KNB)