LARKANA: The Larkana Deve­lopment Authority (LDA) established in 2012 remains ‘non-functional’ and now its employees, protesting outside the local press club on Monday, started calling for their unpaid salaries of one year.

At the protest organised by the LDA employees’ union, its leaders demanded immediate release of funds to the authority to enable it to disburse 12 months’ salaries.

The leaders, Sultan Mangi, Akhtar Sandelo and Irfan Shaikh, led the march from the LDA office in Sachal Colony to the local press club, where they raised slogans against the authorities concerned for neglecting them and the LDA.

Speaking to them, the leaders said that PPP government in 2012 had established the LDA to carry out development works in Larkana division but eight years on, neither a director general was appointed nor did the government lay down a permanent structure to regulate financial affairs of the LDA.

Employees not paid salaries for whole year, says union

Perhaps, they said, the officials at the helm of affairs had put the issue of smoothly running the LDA on the back burner; that was why the employees’ repeated requests to the chief minister and the minister concerned had landed on deaf ears.

They said the chief minister had ordered special grant for the LDA to address the issue after they had held protests in recent past. The LDA received the special grant only for one year, they said, and regretted that for 12 months now, they had not been getting their salaries. “Our families are facing serious financial issues,” they lamented.

The labour leaders pointed out that the LDA under these circumstances had become a non-functional entity. They recalled that in the year 2019, the chief minister and minister for local bodies had promised to absorb them (the employees) in the Larkana Municipal Corporation and district council. “But we are still waiting for this to happen,” they said, and added that the employees’ financial condition was aggravating and their future continued to hang in the balance.

“We are worried about our future; we appeal to PPP chairman Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari, Chief Minister Syed Murad Ali Shah and the LG minister to intervene and solve our genuine issues,” they said.

They suggested that either the LDA be made functional with sufficient and permanent funds or its employees be absorbed in some other departments. They said the indifferent attitude of the authorities concerned was pushing them to go for “extreme step”.

Published in Dawn, December 8th, 2020