KASHMIR: There are certain questions raised by AG office and few days back they wrote to us, we are going to respond to them and make sure that the genuine cases will be addressed,” Andrabi said.Abdul Gani Bhat retired from power development department early this year. With an eye on his GP fund and monthly pension, he fixed marriage of his two daughters. But as the authorities concerned slept on his monthly pension and GP fund case, Bhat was forced to cancel the marriage in absence of any resources.
Like Bhat, scores of PDD employees who retired as technicians, linemen, meter readers say that from 2008 they took monetary benefits of SRO 59 but as they retired in Jan 2018, the authorities are not extending SRO 59 benefits to their retirement and as a result their cases are pending.
“We retired in January this year, as we started processing the documents for GP fund and monthly pension at AG office, we were told that SRO 59 benefits won’t be extended to us unless we complete some formalities from PDD department which we did. Despite completing all the formalities, our cases are pending as AG office is not accepting our files saying that we have to give up SRO 59 benefits”, said Abdul Gani, a retired employee.
“We don’t understand if all our colleagues who retired before January 2018 are taking benefits why are not same extended in our favour, we have been suffering as many of us relay on our retirement funds and monthly pension,” he said.
A senior official of PDD said that SRO 59 which gives one step up-gradation and monetary benefits to employees was implemented on engineering wings of various departments in 1989 however it was not implemented on PDD before 1995.
“After 6 year delay SRO 59 was implemented in 1995 but it was monetarily applied only in 2008, since then all the employees who retired before December this year took these benefits in retirement except a few who are struggling,” the senior official said.
“We don’t understand that why officials from finance and AG office are citing technicalities now when 90% of employees have taken these benefits”, he said.
The retired employees said that around 20000 employees took benefit of SRO 59 who retired pre January 2018 but the handful of them who retired post January are deprived of the same.
Director General Codes, Finance Department, Mohammad Rafi Andrabi told the Greater Kashmir that in these issues there were several orders and technicalities which made the cases a mixed bag of genuine and non-genuine cases and that they are going by proper procedure so that the genuine cases won’t have to suffer.
“There are certain questions raised by AG office and few days back they wrote to us, we are going to respond to them and make sure that the genuine cases will be addressed,” Andrabi said.
“There are some cases who are asking for 1995 SRO benefits in 2017, it won’t work that way. In PDD cases the SRO that was supposed to fully apply from a particular year has been applied by concerned department years later, even AG office is not stopping the cases. All they want from concerned department is to record the reason of delay,” he said.
Andrabi further said that they are continuously clarifying that who is genuine case and who not. “We are on it and we are clearing all cases that are coming in,” he clarified.
