Victim of the system: Denied dues, pensioner takes own life

Muhammad Iqbal, retired KMC employee, leaves behind wife, daughter and son

KARACHI: It was four in the evening and Amna Iqbal, after having made roti, was eagerly waiting for her 63-year-old husband, Muhammad Iqbal, to come home to their 80-square yard house in Shah Latif Town so they could have lunch.

Since the neighbourhood had been without electricity for three days, the family had no access to television or their mobile phones.

After hearing media vehicles stop in front of the gate, Amna became tense, and then almost collapsed when media men informed her of the death of her husband.

Nowhere to go

At around 8am on Monday, Iqbal left his house for the Civic Center building on University Road to inquire about the status of his pension from the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation (KMC), which has been pending for three years.

By 10:15am, Iqbal had jumped to his death from the building’s sixth floor. He was taken to Abbasi Shaheed Hospital where a post-mortem was conducted.

He needed the money to install an electricity meter at his home, explained his daughter, Saeeda.

According to KMC’s documents, Iqbal was a former KMC employee who retired from the health department as a coolie in 1999. His current pension was Rs8,184 per month.

What Iqbal had been deprived of was the annual increase in his pension for the last three years, which amounted to around Rs80,000, according to KMC welfare additional director Muhammad Asif.

Asif claimed that Iqbal had never applied for payment of arrears of any outstanding dues in the welfare department. However, he jumped off from the same floor where the welfare department is housed.

Saeeda said that her father had been running from pillar to post at the Civic Center for the last three years but was denied the enhanced pension amount. “He was asked to pay Rs0.1 million [bribe] to get the money released,” she alleged, adding that they could not come up with such a huge amount.

According to Saeeda, she and her only brother, Naveed, do not have a job and their father was the sole bread winner of the family.

Lingering issue 

KMC’s worker union Sajjan’s president Zulfiqar Shah said the issue of pension and gratuity has been lingering since December 2012. He explained that the District Municipal Corporations (DMCs) are bound to pay a certain amount to the KMC for payment of all DMC employees’ pensions and gratuities, which is Rs500 million.

Since the payment had been halted for four years, he said the Supreme Court recently directed the Sindh government to release the amount, warning to otherwise freeze their accounts.

After that, a standard operating procedure was drafted, according to which the ceased amount, which is Rs2.05 billion, would be dispatched to the KMC in three years. “Each month KMC would get Rs70 million,” he said, adding that there are still 1,330 employees of the KMC or the DMCs that are yet to be paid.

Speaking about Iqbal’s case, he said there are several employees who have not received the yearly increased amount in their pensions for the last three years due to the suspension of payment to the KMC.

Karachi Deputy Mayor Arshad Vohra said they have asked the Sindh government to issue the payment in one go so they could release the pending amount altogether.

However, Local Govern-ment Minister Jam Khan Shoro said KMC gets Rs500 million from the Sindh government to meet its expenditures, adding that, “If employees aren’t getting pensions, the government will find out why.”

Published in The Express Tribune, October 25^th, 2016.