PHE daily wagers demand regularisation of jobs, stage protest

Demanding regularisation of their services, hundreds of daily wage workers of the Public Health Engineering (PHE) department in Jammu and Kashmir today held a protest rally and tried to gherao the Civil Secretariat here.
However, the protesting PHE workers were stopped by the police before they could proceed to the Secretariat.
"Many of us have been working as daily wage workers for past more than a decade, but despite assurances by successive state governments no step has been taken to regularise our services," said the protestors.
They said the workers have been raising the demand for their regularisation for the past several months but the authorities did not pay heed and they decided to gherao the Civil Secretariat.

They accused the BJP of not keeping their pre-poll promise to redress the grievances of the daily wage PHE workers.
The PHE workers have threatened to intensify their agitation if the government fails to regularise their services.

Police had a tough time controlling the protesting workers from proceeding towards the Civil Secretariat and they were stopped near B C Road.
"We had to use barbed wires to block the road so as to stop these protesting PHE workers from proceeding towards the Civil Secretariat," a police officer said.
He said elaborate security arrangements have been put in place to maintain law and order in the city.