Police foils march by VRS employees of SRTC

Excelsior Correspondent

JAMMU, Apr 13: Police today foiled an attempt of taking out a march towards Civil Secretariat by members of All J&K SRTC Volunteer Retired Employees Association who were protesting against State SRTC and Transport Department for not clearing their pending dues.
Shouting slogans in support of their demands, the VRS employees assembled near the Press Club and marched towards Civil Secretariat in the form of a procession.
However, Police did not allow them to move further and stopped them near Dogra Chowk, where a minor scuffle took place between protestors and police cops.
The protest rally was headed by VRS employees’ Union president, Dev Raj Bali and general secretary, Surinder Singh, who strongly criticized the discriminative attitude of SRTC and higher authorities of Transport Department towards VRS employees of State SRTC.
“It is very strange that 126 slabs of COLA were given to the in-service employees of State SRTC whereas same has been denied to 742 VRS employees despite the fact that they were in service at the time of implementation of 6th Pay Commission”, said Dev Raj Bali.
He also reiterated other demands of the Association, which included clearing 16 pending installments of COLA since 2006, 18 installments of 2007, 26 installments of COLA since 2008, 35 installments of COLA since 2009, 31 installments of COLA upto 2010, pending arrears since 1999 and 6th Pay Commission arrears with effect from January 1, 2006.
Bali flayed the previous coalition Government for not paying heed towards their issues and appealed to the Finance Minister to intervene into the issues of VRS personally.
Among others present were Balwinder Singh, DN Sharma, BB Sharma, Surjit Singh, Sain Mohammad, Kulbir Singh, Deep Raj, etc.

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