Rural postal employees under the banner of All India Gramin Dak Sevaks Union staged a hunger strike on Tallakulam Head Post Office premises seeking implementation of Kamalesh Chandra committee recommendations including pay hike for them.
Around 50 employees participated in the fast as part of the all-India protest here and it was led by the divisional secretary M. Mathiazhagan and president K. Kishore Kumar.
The union assistant circle secretary M. Baskaran said that majority of operations of postal department was run by rural postal employees. “This is recognised by the Kamalesh Chandra committee. It found that 75 % of work was executed by over 2.75 lakh rural postal employees in 1.25 lakh post offices. However, our salary was in the range of ₹7,000 to ₹10,000 a month,” he said.
The employees did not get any benefit or allowance. “We were told to work for four hours a day. But in practice we slog from the morning to evening. We do all kinds of postal activities like delivery, selling stamps, booking speed and registered post and collect money for various deposit and insurance schemes,” he added.
Many of them are deployed in city post offices to fill vacancies in permanent posts. But we are treated like slaves without job security and basic welfare schemes like provident fund or medical benefits. Even in private sector, benefits like PF and employees state insurance schemes are provided, he said. The Centre is not implementing the report of Kamalesh Chandra committee for more than a year. The panel had suggested to absorb the rural postal employees as Group D employees with a monthly salary of ₹21,000.