Demanding regularisation of their services, hundreds of daily-wage workers of the Public Health Engineering (PHE) department held a protest rally in Bhaderwah on the 42nd day of their strike on Thursday.
They tried to stop traffic in the busy Chowgan Bazaar and threatened to boycott the upcoming District Development Council (DDC) polls.
Hundreds of daily-wage workers gathered at the sub divisional office of the PHE department here from where they took out a rally that passed through different markets of the town including Chinar Mohalla, Iqbal Colony, Haveli Mohalla, Khakhal, Sartingal Road and Ganpat Bazaar.
They were protesting against the authorities for their ‘failure’ to release their salaries and frame a policy for regularisation of their jobs.
A large number of PHE daily-wagers also raised slogans against the government.
“The DDC polls are near and the families of the poor workers will give these parties an appropriate answer in the polls,” said President of the Daily-wagers Association of PHE, Sajjad Ahmed. “If our demands are not met, we will boycott the polls.”
Senior leaders of Jammu Kashmir National Panthers Party (JKNPP) including their senior vice president Iqbal Chowdhary, district president Neeraj Singh Manhas and district youth president Rashid Chowdhary also joined the protestors in support of their demands.
“These workers have been raising their demand for regularisation for the past several months but the authorities did not pay heed,” Chowdhary said. He accused the BJP of not keeping their pre-poll promise of redressing the grievances of daily-wage PHE workers.