Pay up: SHC wants issue of KMC employees' salaries resolved in two weeks

The court has ordered a meeting of officials to discuss payment and finances.

KARACHI: The Sindh High Court has directed the secretaries of the local government and finance departments as well as the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation (KMC) administrator to convene a meeting of all district municipal corporations to resolve the issues relating to disbursement of funds so that salaries could be paid to the employees and pensioners.

Justice Muhammad Ali Mazhar, who headed the bench, further ordered that the meeting must be held within 15 days and that the court should be informed about its outcome. The KMC workers union - Sajjan - had taken the Sindh finance department and KMC authorities to court last year.

According to the union's lawyer, Nadeem Sheikh, thousands of employees, including the staff of the fire brigade department, as well as pensioners, have not been paid salaries for the last two to three months. This includes the hundreds of sanitary workers that are responsible for keeping the city clean.

During the course of the hearings, the court had been issuing directions to the provincial government's finance secretary to resolve the problem by providing Rs500 million as aid to KMC by the tenth of every month but the issue is yet to be resolved.

Adjourning the hearing, the bench ordered the officials to inform the court about the meeting's outcome by the next date of hearing.