Kolhapur: The central provident fund (CPF) on Wednesday froze the two bank accounts of the Kolhapur Municipal Transport (KMT) for failing to pay insurance dues of 1,000 odd employees.
Owing to the financial troubles, the KMT administration failed to deposit the PF amount of over Rs 4.14 crore since June 2015. The transport undertaking employees had asked CPF authorities to act against KMT officials. As the two bank accounts were frozen, the KMT administration has to undertake all transactions in cash.
Sanjay Inamdar, the KMT's public relations officer (PRO), said, "We will take a decision over the PF contributions only after municipal commissioner P Siva Sankar returns to work as he is on leave for a few days. The amount could not be paid owing to the revenue losses that the transport undertaking faced over the last few years. But, we will manage the funds in the next few days."
Last week, KMT workers threatened to launch an indefinite strike over salary dues pending for the last two months. In 2016, salary dues of KMT employees for May and June each amounts to Rs 1.65 crore. On Wednesday, the KMT made partial payments of the salary dues. "We have paid Rs 50 lakh as salary dues and over the next few days, the rest of the dues will be cleared," Inamdar said.
KMT workers called for the strike from July 16. After a meeting with the mayor Ashwini Ramane, however, the strike was called off till July 21. The civic body's transport undertaking is facing losses of over Rs 3 lakh every day, owing to poor management. The KMT recently decided to initiate strict measures such as cancelling buses along long routes causing heavy losses and keeping buses with high maintenance costs off the roads.
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