Zonal officials disregard civic body chief’s order

Zonal officials disregard civic body chief’s order
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Highlights

In a classic case of defiance, the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) Commissioner B Janardhan Reddy’s instructions to Zonal Commissioners to reshuffle Sanitary Field Assistants (SFA) has not been so far carried out. Cheekiness of the SFAs is also evident from the refusal of using bio-metric attendance system. 

It is said that zonal commissioners are under pressure from SFAs not to carry out the GHMC Commissioner’s circular

Hyderabad: In a classic case of defiance, the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) Commissioner B Janardhan Reddy’s instructions to Zonal Commissioners to reshuffle Sanitary Field Assistants (SFA) has not been so far carried out. Cheekiness of the SFAs is also evident from the refusal of using bio-metric attendance system.

When queried about the delay in reshuffle, zonal commissioners are not in short of excuses for not implementing the circular issued by Janardhan Reddy.

Zonal Commissioner (East) CN Raghu Prasad said that he has been following the decision taken by standing committee meeting, in which it was decided to reshuffle the SFAs who have been facing more number of corrupt allegations first and that he reshuffled two SFAs so far. The zonal commissioner also said that he would only reshuffle SFAs if he receives any complaints against them.

BV Gangadhar Reddy, west zone commissioner said that there has been a joint decision taken by all zonal commissioners to reshuffle the SFAs after March 31, during the next financial year.

Hari Chandana Dasari central zone commissioner said that she was unaware of the reshuffle. When tried to contact erstwhile zonal commissioner N Ravi Kiran he was on medical leave.

South zone commissioner S Srinivas Reddy expressed that it was not compulsory to reshuffle the SFAs. However, he said that minor reshuffles took place in the zone.

J Shankaraiah (north zonal commissioner) said that the corporation has decided to reshuffle after implementing Enabled Biometric Attendance System (AEBAS).

The recently introduced Aadhaar-linked AEBAS through hand held point of scale devices was also ‘disapproved’ by SFAs. Highly placed sources in the corporation said that the SFAs threatened the zonal commissioners and also gave a written representation asking the later to only use registers.

Apart from this, SFAs also have objections to perform additional duties including election, collecting property tax, trade license and others.

Due to lack of efficient management system on the field, there were number of instances where the attendance recorded in registers of SAFs has been manipulated. A pilot of biometric-based attendance for sanitation workers in circle 8 for six months revealed that 30 per cent of the workers were bogus resulting in GHMC paying more salary than required.

Sources said that the bio-metric attendance system could not be implemented due to the lack of corporation from SFAs and succumbing to the pressure of SFAs, zonal commissioners have not yet implemented the GHMC commissioner’s orders. In all it is interesting to note how SFAs have a major say in the functioning of the Corporation.

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