As Hyderabad water agency cash dries up, unpaid staff turn off the taps

WASA claims it needs Rs130 million for salaries but can’t pay because residents don’t.


Z Ali November 02, 2011

HYDERABAD:


Angry and unpaid staff closed down all water filtration and drainage plants in Hyderabad on Tuesday, cutting off a supply of 45 million gallons to the district.


Nearly 3,000 of them have not been paid for a quarter by the Water and Sanitation Agency, a subsidiary of the Hyderabad Development Authority.

“If we are not paid by November 6, people will be living through an Eid without water and drainage,” warned an enraged Behram Chang, who leads the labour union.

The staff began by cutting off the main plant at Jamshoro road which supplies around 30 MGD, confirmed one of its officers, Zeeshan Malik.

The unionists were going to turn off the tap for a full 24 hours but decided on four hours only. They said, however, that each day they are not paid they will add an hour to the protest.

The problem is that even if WASA wants to pay its staff, it doesn’t have the money. It doesn’t earn as much as it spends and a government subsidy was stopped in 1992. They make Rs10 million by charging residents but need about Rs30 million to pay salaries alone.

“We need at least Rs130 million to pay the backlogged salaries,” WASA’s MD Saleemuddin told The Express Tribune. He even acknowledges that the workers are making a genuine demand. But says that he disagrees with their method of protest.

WASA has been in talks with the union but has no way of even meeting them half way, by for example, promising to pay in a day or two. With empty coffers, the only way out for WASA is if the Sindh government gives it a cash injection to defuse the situation.

As with most internal crises for any institution, here too there are claims that the management actually has the money but is deliberately not paying staff. One WASA officer claimed that the official figures of Rs30 million for salaries and Rs25 million for expenses were “exaggerated”. “They spend less than what they proclaim,” he said, insinuating that corruption was at hand. If he is to be believed, WASA made up to Rs100 million in the last  four months.

Paying up

WASA has been struggling to get people to pay their water bills. In fact, the director of finance was recently changed in an attempt to get some fresh blood to take a stab at the problem. But the odds are stacked against the recovery team.

The pressure is intense as HDA chief Ghulam Muhammad Qaimkhani has been asking WASA to boost its recovery from Rs10 million to Rs35 million.

The recovery problem is two-pronged. “First we have to deal with the influential, politically and otherwise, in Latifabad and Qasimabad tehsils,” explained an official. Second, the City tehsil where a reasonable number of residents pay their bills, it barely makes a dent in the system because they fall in the category that needs to just give Rs124 to Rs150 a month.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 3rd, 2011.

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