Civic services remain hit on Day 2 of Maha strike

Nagpur: Several public services of the Nagpur Municipal Corporation (NMC), Regional Transport Office (RTO), and other state government offices remained affected on second consecutive day on Wednesday as thousands of employees continued their indefinite strike over a host of demands, including restoration of the old pension scheme (OPS).
In NMC, services like issuance of birth and death certificates and other clerical work such as filing of complaints on zone level remained crippled and many residents who wanted to avail of these services had to return empty-handed.
NMC’s deputy municipal commissioner Nirbhay Jain served show-cause notices to 219 employees for remaining absent from duty for the last two days.
President of Rashtriya Nagpur Corporation Employees’ Association (Intuc) Surendra Tingne said the response to the strike was more compared to yesterday as several employees from various government departments joined the stir and also participated in the demonstrations at Vidhan Bhavan Square. “The employees’ federation in Mumbai is in talks with the state government on OPS,” he said.
Similar was the situation in RTOs. Apart from no services in all three RTOs — city, deputy east and rural, the transport department also suffered a revenue loss of Rs1 crore in the last two days.
The secondary education department in Nagpur district faced acute staff shortage with only three employees running the show. Ravindra Katolkar, district education officer, said, “We have total 20 employees of which one is on sick leave and 16 are on strike. Only a clerk, one deputy education officer and myself are handling the work.”
Many grant-in-aid and government schools faced problems in conducting regular classes due to teachers joining the strike. “No school had 100% impact as there are many teachers who already are covered under the old pension scheme. Yes, some classes were affected but overall it was managed well including the board exams,” said Katolkar.
So far, teacher unions have decided to ensure full cooperation in the invigilation of board exams and boycott only the paper evaluation process.