Over 50 employees of the Jharkhand Mineral Area Development Authority (JMADA) on Wednesday sat on a dharna outside the office of the managing director of the civic body, at its Luby Circular Road based headquarters in Dhanbad. The protesters agitated against a host of demands including the pending salary payment, disbursement of arrears to retired employees and so on.

The sit-in was triggered when JMADA Managing Director Dilip Kumar denied permission to meet a delegation of employees, who sought to discuss with him the long-pending issues related to the payment of their salaries among others.

Talking to reporters on Wednesday, Raju Balmiki, the President of the JMADA unit of Janta Mazdoor Sangh (Kunti Faction) said, “It is for the first time in the recent memory that the employees have not been paid salary ahead of Chhath.”

“The response of the Managing Director to the employees, who are deprived of their salary for 46 months, is really distressing as during the recent talk with us he said that they can’t pay the salary regularly. He said that the employers had paid salary ahead of Durga puja so there is no fund left to pay the salary ahead of Chhath again” said Balmiki, a fourth grade employee of JMADA.

“Whenever we demand payment of our pending salaries the authorities make excuses of non-payment of funds from the government. We wanted to know from authorities when actually the fund is expected to arrive,” he added.

Rakesh Singh, General Secretary of the same organisation, said, “The civic body administration is always making excuses regarding the poor financial situation of JMADA. We wanted to know how this situation can improve because it is very difficult for the employees to sustain their families due to non-payment of salary.”

“We had a meeting with the participants of the dharna, during which we assured them about the steps being taken to ensure further payment of salary to the employees. We also explained the financial constraints with us,” Indresh Shukla, Executive Engineer cum Technical Member of JMADA, said.

“We will make the payment as soon as we get funds from different sources, including the government,” he added.