SSPG staff continues two-hour work boycott on ninth day of protest

VARANASI: More than 50 IVth grade employees including ward and cleaning staff of the Shri Shiv Prasad Gupta Divisional Hospital continued their two-hour boycott of services for the ninth consecutive day on Friday.
The employees are protesting for their 11-point demands still pending with the hospital administration. However, the superintendent-in-chief (SIC), SSPG Divisional Hospital, VK Srivastava said that hospital administration has, on many occasions, tried to hold talks with the fourth grade employees of the hospital."In fact we have also agreed to a number of demands and have also given this in writing but somehow they do not seem to be interested in sorting out the problem. Rather everyday they turn up with a new demand," he said.
A meeting called by the hospital administration with the protesting employees on Friday also ended abruptly without any breakthrough. According to secretary of Chaturth Shreni Karmchari Sangathan (CSKS) Ranjit Kumar one of the administrative staff used abusive language for the employees which forced them to back off from the talk. However, the SIC said that it was not clear why employees left the meeting all of a sudden.
With the IVth grade employees, who also claim support of the third grade employees, abstained from their duties for two hours, the services in almost all the departments of the hospital remained affected on Friday too. Patients were seen requesting the ward boys to help them.
Services mainly at pathology, ECG and registration sections are suffering due to the boycott. Ranjit Kumar said the employees did not boycott the services in emergency ward and OPD.
"Our aim is not to trouble the patients but to secure our genuine interests. There was no other way left for us. The seriousness of the authorities to resolve the issue can be well gauged by the fact that it is the ninth consecutive day of the boycott and protest at the hospital premises yet none of our demands have been accepted." Meanwhile, the administration maintained that the hospital services are not being affected by the protest and the hospital is functioning normally.
The 11-point demand letter of the CSKS includes issues like rotation of duties of employees, which as per their view is never fixed, creates a lot of confusion and recruitment of employees on contractual basis and not sharing the list of such employees with rest of the employees.
"We have come to know that as many as 32 employees have been recruited on contractual basis in the place of retiring employees but we never seen them in the hospital premises. Despite these recruitments we are forced to work extra on most occasions and we are not paid extra for this," said Ranjit, further adding that at present even the registration work at the counter which is supposed to be managed by third grade employees, is being done by fourth grade employees despite that fact that the same has been prohibited by the government and is termed as illegal." But SIC maintained that third grade employees were working at the registration counter.
As a matter of fact when TOI visited the hospital premises it found that two fourth grade employees were completing the registration process at the registration counter.