Nurses recruited through the Medical Services Recruitment Board (MRB) staged a protest on Friday, demanding that the government regularise their services.
N. Subin, general secretary of the Tamil Nadu MRB Nurses’ Empowerment Association, said the State government had recruited 14,000 nurses through MRB since 2015. “Nurses are first recruited on a two-year contract on the basis of merit through an examination. The government says that the nurses will be absorbed under the regular timescale after two years, but this has not been done. Till date, only 2,000 nurses have been regularised,” he said.
According to him, the State government has also not implemented a court order to grant them “equal pay for equal work”. “When we joined, our monthly salary was ₹7,500. In 2017, following a protest, the government raised the pay to ₹14,000. But it has not implemented equal pay for equal work. As per this, we should get ₹42,000, on a par with staff nurses,” he said.
Meanwhile, members of the government nurses’ associations wore black badges to work to draw the attention of the government to their demands. They demanded pay on a par with Central government nurses, one-month special pay that was announced by the government for COVID-19 duty, ex-gratia for nurses affected by COVID-19, and solatium as well as government jobs for kin of nurses who died.
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