The state government that has been witnessing quite a handful of protests, and the recent one to join the bandwagon were the noon meal workers while officials from the Transport Department are gearing up for strike.
Chennai:
The reason for their discontent is common — lack of funds from the government.
While others protesters have better luck, the mid-day meal workers faced an embarrassing situation recently. When their initial agitation went unnoticed, the workers stopped preparing the meals. That caught the government’s attention.
Since most of the demands were related to finance, the concerned minister and the top bureaucrats were not really interested in the talks with the protesters, yet they went ahead with it because of orders from the Chief Minister. Now the protesters stopped their agitation anticipating some solution to come out of the talks, but to their surprise, in the meeting, the minister declared that the government is running short of funds and so there was nothing that they could do to help the workers. Red-faced, the noon meal makers were left with little option but to continue with the protest.
Interestingly, the government used the same excuse when employees from the transport asked for their PF to be returned. When they started their protest with renewed vigour before Deepavali, the top officials from the department gave them the same answer — the government did not have funds to spare.
This practised answer almost makes a taxpayer confront the concerned ministers directly and ask where is all the money being spent?
—Yazhiniyan, Chennai