Shillong, Aug 7: Chief Minister Conrad K Sangma has dismissed the opposition’s claims that his government is trying to cripple the Garo Hills Autonomous District Council stating that the “destruction process” started during the tenure of the then Congress government led by Mukul Sangma.
However, it was the National People’s Party (NPP)-led government, which had taken tough decisions to bring the council’s finances under control.
Reacting to the leader of opposition Mukul Sangma’s allegation, Conrad told reporters on Thursday that the GHADC had over 2,000 employees when NPP took over, which was significantly higher than the number of employees in other autonomous councils – (KHADC with only 600 employees and JHADC with only 1800 employees)
He stated that the previous government had made appointments without sanctioned posts or service rules, leading to a large number of ghost employees.
Conrad claimed that the GHADC’s salary expenditure was around Rs 6-7 crores, while the revenue was only Rs 1-2 crores per month, resulting in a significant deficit of almost Rs 5 crore.
“So, therefore the destruction process, which the opposition leader is talking about started during their time,” he stated.
The Chief Minister said that his government has taken steps to reform the council, including removing ghost employees and not making new appointments, reducing the number of employees to around 1,300.
“I am happy to inform you that from 2000 plus employees today there are about 1300 employees in GHADC and the reason is, why is because we went through the whole list, there were a large number of ghosts employees names, we removed those names, we have not appointed a single person from the day, we took over till now because we realise that it is impossible to run the system and we have been now able to slowly bring things under control,” he stated adding “This is the kind of activities which a lot of people are not aware, but we have taken tough decision. You know how difficult it is because expectations are there, people expect that we will employ people the posts become vacant, why are we not you appointing people but we saw that those posts that were pointed were actually not done in a legal manner.”
“This is what is happening in the council and if there is anybody to kind of blame in the situation is the previous dispensation which as I said, appointed people left, right and centre without looking at the revenue, without looking at the funds and most importantly, without following the rules and procedures,”he added further
Further, chief minister said there is no question of misappropriation of the Rs 100 crore fund allocated to the GHADC.
He assured that the funds were used transparently, with a significant portion going towards clearing salary arrears.
Conrad claimed that the fund utilization is clearly documented, with around 75-80% of the amount used to pay salaries.
“The funds helped clear 25-28 months of salary arrears, which had accumulated during the previous government’s time,” he said while assuring that his government is working to improve the situation further and resolve the pending backlog of salaries.
