PANAJI
Chief Minister Pramod Sawant on Friday said a Supreme Court verdict has tied the government's hands in the matter of regularising the services of long-serving contractual employees but added that whatever best facilities and incentives are being provided to them.
"We cannot regularise their services because of a Supreme Court judgement in a Karnataka matter," Sawant said in response to the discussion in the House on a private member's resolution moved by Revolutionary Goans Party (RGP) member Viresh Borkar, seeking a law to regularise the services of all contractual employees who have completed five years and more in government departments and State-owned Corporations.
Sawant said there were around 3,000-plus contractual employees in government departments and an additional 800-odd in State-owned corporations who were all getting DA increments just like regular government staff, besides leave and other service conditions.
"Government will ensure whatever best facilities can be given to them will be done," Sawant said even as he expressed the inability to regularise them, and urged Borkar to withdraw his resolution.
Borkar, however, declined to withdraw the resolution and the entire seven-member Opposition pressed for it to be put to vote and sought a division. It was then defeated by a 20-7 margin.
United opposition
Earlier, all the Opposition members supported the resolution and urged the government to view the issue through an apolitical prism and accept it to give relief to thousands of such contractual employees.
Opposition Leader Yuri Alemao said many of them have been working for as long as 10-15 years and even more with no job security. If they are retrenched, some of them will be on the roads as they will have crossed the age limit for fresh recruitment.
Goa Forward Party's Vijai Sardesai, AAP's Venzy Viegas and Cruz Silva, and Congress' Carlos Alvares Ferreira and Altone D'Costa, all backed Borkar's resolution and demanded that the government work out a plan to regularise contract employees.
Favouritism in
recruitment?
Vijai Sardesai lamented that favouritism in recruitment by politicians in power, particularly those who are elected multiple times, has often led to a situation wherein a large number of employees in a particular department or Corporation all hail from a single constituency.
He opined that this trend is detrimental to efficient governance to which Sawant reverted that this ill of the past will no longer happen as all recruitments will from October 1 be routed through the Staff Selection Commission.
AAP's Viegas questioned the Chief Minister's argument that a Court verdict impedes the government from regularising contract employees. He said the AAP governments in Delhi and Punjab have already regularised a large number of such contract employees and para-teachers, and there was no legal bar to do so.
Backing both sides
Interestingly, the ruling BJP's Siolim MLA, Delilah Lobo, also supported the demand for the regularisation of contract employees during her brief intervention in the discussion. However, Lobo backtracked when the resolution was put to vote and stood to be counted on the ruling side against it when the division was sought.
