Thiruvananthapuram, Jan 16 Biju Prabhakar, Managing Director of Kerala State Road Transport Corporation, has lashed out against the employees, alleging 'major misappropriation' in KSRTC.
The IAS officer was addressing the media here. Prabhakar said KSRTC was running at a loss of more than Rs 7,990 crore and its workers have been opposing the fuel conversion to CNG from diesel as "misappropriation" will then be cut off.
He alleged that workers were not properly attending offices and instead of working for KSRTC many have been pursuing farming and real estate businesses.
He said, "Many permanent employees of the department are not working properly and instead they are doing ginger and turmeric farming. Many depots are managed by temporary employees".
The senior IAS officer also said that the Sushil Khanna report on KSRTC had recommended systematic reduction in staff strength and added that this has to be implemented in a timely manner to save the organisation.
He said that employees used to rotate the collection money for four-five days and when caught and suspended these employees turn into real estate dealers.
Prabhakar also said that there is clear pilferage of diesel and the employees prefer local purchase of spare parts.
"The employees are preferring to buy from local markets which was not recommended by all the committees which studied the KSRTC. The local purchase is encouraged by employees for misappropriation and these local purchases are of inferior quality also," he said.
Rajesh, leader of the BMS union in KSRTC said: "The MD is making baseless allegations against the employees. It is for the management to examine the pilferage issue and take action. Putting all blame on the workers is unacceptable. We demand an explanation from him on this outburst against the workers."
K. Sasidharan, leader of INTUC, the trade union body affiliated to Congress, said: "These are baseless allegations. How can the MD blame employees for the utter administrative failures of the management?"
"He should apologise to the workers. He is the son of an illustrious trade union leader who was finance minister of the state, the late Thachadi Prabhakaran, and he should at least think about that before levelling such unsolicited comments against the workers."
