Staff Reporter
DIMAPUR, AUGUST 20
ALL doctors, nurses and other technical staffs – employed under the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) in Nagaland – would not be attending work at their respective placements all across Nagaland from August 21 onwards.
Announcing this at a news conference here today in Dimapur, members of the NHRM Employees Association expressed regret over the unfortunate turn of events and, at the same time, sought apology from the public for the same.
They hoped, and appealed the Naga public, to understand the reason(s) behind their decision to skip work. Since April this year the NRHM employees, except for some who have been placed at the Directorate of Health and Family Welfare, have not received their salaries.
They maintained that it was “very difficult” for them to perform their duties against such a scenario. “It’s not that we don’t want to work. We are not even against the department concerned. We are simply requesting them to give us our salaries,” one of the member said.
The boycott of duty would continue until their pending salaries are cleared, informed the members of NRHM Employees Association. With around one thousand members, the NHRM employees constitute a major junk of the state’s ailing health sector and have come to represent the engine that drives the sector, especially in rural Nagaland.
It is worth mentioning that the employees had on July 17, last submitted a memorandum to the Mission Director of NRHM, Nagaland that drew his attention to the same. It was reported that the department officials had sought “some few weeks” to sort it out.
But more than a month since then, the department concerned has failed to respond to the plea of the employees, forcing the latter to call for a boycott of work for an indefinite period of time.
