Money woes: 32,000 KMC employees wait for pay day

Sanitation staff threatens to park garbage trucks outside key offices.

KARACHI: As the month of Ramazan approaches – bringing with it expenses for Iftars and Eid – the 32,000 employees working in different departments of the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation (KMC) have three more days to wait for their salaries.

Their pay cheques for June are already overdue by eight days since the Sindh government has not released funds as yet, according to the head of KMC’s finance department Amir Khursheed.

“Hopefully, we will get the funds by Monday evening or Tuesday,” he said. “But in any case it takes three days to transfer the money into the employees’ accounts. The start of Ramazan has increased the anxiety of workers.”

The city administration requires Rs800 million every month to pay its employees, ranging from sanitary workers to engineers. The money comes from the Sindh government as its share from the General Sales Tax (GST) revenue which KMC is entitled to.

A union of employees has already threatened to stop work if they don’t get paid immediately. The sanitation staff has warned that it will park garbage trucks outside important offices.  Khursheed said he has been running between the finance and local government departments to get the funds released at the earliest. The root of the problem lies in the current status of KMC, he said.

“The municipal corporation, as you see it, is a temporary arrangement. Major political parties are still working on the new local government system,” he said.

The tenure of the temporary set up expired couple of months back and the chief minister’s office had to issue a notification extending it for another two months.

KMC’s own revenues are not enough to pay the salaries. “All the money we raise in taxes is consumed by running expenses like paying for fuel, food for animals at the zoo and buying oxygen cylinders for the hospitals.”

Published in The Express Tribune, July 17^th, 2012.