Municipality Strike: Justified move, but will bring in a lot of problems for common people   

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If you are walking on the streets of Barak Valley’s Municipality areas, more often than not you will have to hold your breath and close your eyes, because of smelly garbage lying all around. The daily cleaning routine is heavily abrupt due to the state-wide agitation of the Municipality workers.

The State Municipality workers have been denied their salaries and other fundamental rights that they deserve being employees of the board which functions as an entity of the Assam State Government. As a result of which the State Municipality Committee had called for a state-wide strike on February 1 and 2, and informed the authorities that, if no official communication reaches them by February 7, 2018, they will again call for a strike. Well, no official communication is issued by the authorities and the Municipality workers are back on strike which will continue till February 12, 2018. The State Municipality committee has also informed that if no official communication is issued by the government before February 11, then the Municipality workers will go on a 10 day strike starting from February 12.

Silchar Municipality Board employees have not received their wages since last six months, other boards in the state has denied their employees since 22 months and they are going through a very tough time. The employees were assured long back that they would be treated as State Government Employees, as a result of which they would be entitled to all the State Government facilities which other government employees enjoy. Nothing happened on that front either and that is another reason behind the agitation. So their call for protest is quite justified, but the tiff between Assam Government and Municipality Board has posed serious threat to hygiene. Municipality strike means complete shutdown of all of their duties, which includes: cleanliness of the municipality areas, maintenance of drainage and other infrastructure maintenance which are essential for smooth and healthy proceedings of daily life.

Because of the strike, the trash-cans are overloaded and garbage is assembled at every nook and corner of Silchar, Karimganj and Hailakandi. Even in Brahmaputra valley the scenario is quite similar as this is a statewide agitation.

If the streets are not cleaned immediately many diseases will start spreading in the city. Now it remains to be seen if Government issues an official solution and the strike gets called off, or the resident start falling prey to the diseases reproducing in the unattended garbage.