Calling the Bengal government’s announcement for a 3 per cent DA (dearness allowance) hike a “pittance”, a section of state government employees, including teachers, has called a 48-hour work strike across all government offices and educational institutions on February 20-21.

This would be the second such strike within a week. The agitating employees, under the banner of "Sangrami Joutha Mancha (united platform for struggle)", have been holding an indefinite hunger strike at the Shahid Minar ground in central Calcutta on the DA issue for about a week now. It had undertaken a similar pen-down strike on February 13.

The call for a strike, a rarity during the 12-year rule of the Trinamul Congress government which has a zero-tolerance policy for strikes and bandhs, came a day after the state finance minister, Chandrima Bhattacharya, made the DA hike announcement effective next month in her budget speech after being prompted by chief minister Mamata Banerjee.

Despite the hike, the current DA gap between state employees and their central counterparts remains at 32 per cent. The difference would go up to 36 per cent once the Centre implements the additional 4 per cent DA hike it has recently announced.

“The 3 per cent DA hike is a reflection of Mamata Banerjee’s empathy and support for the state government employees. We are doing the best we can under the current financial constraints we are working in,” Bhattacharya had said after tabling her budget on Wednesday. Refusing to spell out the burden on the state exchequer this hike would have, she said, “We are working out the math”, confirming speculation that the move had not been thought through.

“The hike announcement was like alms being thrown at beggars. We are demanding what’s our right and we will not settle for anything less,” said Pijush Kanti Roy, a primary school teacher and an activist for the Sangrami Joutha Mancha.

“Ours is an umbrella platform for 38 organizations of state government employees. The employees will either remain absent from work or will attend offices and schools on those two days but won’t discharge their duties. Those engaged in emergency services like in hospitals, fire brigades etc are, of course, exempted from the strike call,” Roy stated.

The hunger strike has already begun taking its toll on the agitating employees. Bhaskar Ghosh, a state co-convenor of the platform, was admitted to SSKM Hospital on Thursday with unstable vitals but took a forced discharge to rejoin the hunger strikers later in the day.

“We are not only demanding that our DA be made at par with the central government employees but we also want the state to maintain absolute transparency in the recruitment processes of its employees across all departments,” Roy said, adding, “It’s not just the recruitment irregularities in schools, but the multiple other petitions being heard by the courts has led us to believe that there could have been recruitment corruption in other departments as well.”

Told about the financial stress at state coffers which the government usually sites for holding back DA, Roy said: “The state has never said that officially. It could have disbursed the pending DA in tranches from 2016 and avoided a one-time burden on its exchequer but it never made that attempt. The state will now have to find a way to solve this problem, not us.”

Asked what would be the response of the agitating employees if the Mamata Banerjee government took punitive action against the striking employees, Roy said: “The decision-making team of our organization will have to take a call after consulting lawyers, in case the government decides to take that step.”

“The state won’t be able to ignore us for long because without us there will be no state,” Roy declared.