Bali urges J-K health dept employees to resume duties

Jammu and Kashmir government has urged health department employees to suspend nearly two-month long agitation and resume their duties forthwith, assuring release of their pending salaries within a week's time and regular disbursement henceforth.
Employees of health and family welfare department went on an indefinite strike on April 17 to press for release of their salaries pending for more than nine months.
"The Finance Department is likely to release the funds within next couple of days, which will enable the department to release the pending salaries of the employees," Health and Medical Education Minister Bali Bhagat said.
He said government was aware about the difficulties being faced by the employees of family welfare in absence of their salaries, but it was a technical issue, which needed a rigorous exercise, and now the matter stands almost resolved permanently.

"Now onwards, they will get the salaries regularly without waiting for the funds from the Centre as the corpus will be utilised for the purpose and adjusted later when they are received in normal course.
"To address this technical issue once for all, the matter has been taken up with the finance department, who in turn has agreed in principal to make a provision of Rs 51.50 crore for creating a corpus by the department of health and medical education for timely disbursement of salaries to the employees of family welfare department under the central sponsored scheme," the minister said.

He said the mechanism was aimed at to delink from Centre flow of funds, and cover the mismatch in flows from the Centre to ensure regular salary disbursement to such employees.
"An amount of Rs 40 crore was released on his intervention by the Centre and 75 per cent payments were made," the minister said.
Bhagat appealed the employees to suspend their agitation and return to their duties immediately as the government assures to release their pending salaries within a week's time.