CHANDIGARH: The Safai Karamchari Union has threatened an indefinite strike from Friday for making sanitation workers wear GPS-enabled watches to keep a tab on their movement at a time when field employees of horticulture, building and roads (B&R), public health and electrical and engineering officers and senior bureaucrats have not objected to them being tagged.
A total of 4,000 GPS watches have been distributed to different wings of the civic body. As many as 2,184 of them are with the sanitation department headed by the medical officer of health, while the rest have been distributed to other wings.
None of the employees from the other department have complained about the watches and are wearing them regularly.
“We are working at our respective sites and getting full salaries accordingly,” a field employee of the building and road department said. Another employee of the public health wing said, “We have been wearing these watches for past few months and there are no health issues. Moreover, it is quite easy for us to click our photo and mark attendance.”
However, Safai Karamchari Union is demanding all 10,000 employees of the MC, including those stationed in the office, wear the watches. Krishan Chadha, president of the union, said, “Why only a few employees are singled out for the GPS watches. Why clerks, superintendents and peons have not been given the watches? These watches are defective. We have decided to hold a strike from Friday. Let’s see if talks mature or not.”
A senior office of the MC said, “There are neither any health issues nor any technical snag with the watches. There is a technical team to look into such issues, which do not exist. These are simple GPS-enabled watches to track employees.”
MONTHLY RENT: RS 18L
The project is the first of its kind in the region
A company is providing 4,000 watches to the MC for Rs 437.78 a piece per month
The civic body has to pay Rs 18 lakh rent per month
The watches will be provided for three years. The period can be extended for five years by a year at a time as per performance.
The project is already successful in Indore, Navi Mumbai, Nagpur, Panchkula and some other cities
TALKS ON
Sources said some BJP leaders are in talks with Safai Karamchari Union leaders to convince them not to hold the strike. The union members are holding regular meetings with other unions of different departments of the UT administration for their support
KEY features
Geofencing zoning, camera, speaker and microphone facilities.
Creating an automatic attendance register
An alert is sent to the designated person in case the person takes the watch off during working hours or leaves the assigned work area.
Cloud-based software application to handle attendance