Tamil Nadu - Erode   

79-year-old fights for retirement benefits

K.C. Krishnasamy

ERODE: Seventy-nine-year-old K. C. Krishnasamy has participated in and won battles during his service in the Indian Army.

An army man to the core, he hates defeat but fears he may lose the fight against the Erode Corporation. The ex-service man’s battle is for getting his retirement benefits.

Soon after quitting the Army as a Naik, Mr. Krishnasamy joined the Erode Corporation, then a municipality, on June 23, 1978.

He worked as a watchman at the municipal abattoir and then at the Railway Colony Municipal High School and Kamaraj High School, from where he retired.

When he joined, the municipality took him as a contingency staff like a daily wager for Rs. 15 a day salary.

Then the municipality, following a March 1988 Government Order that services of such contingency staff shall be regularised after 10 years of service, without taking age into consideration, regularised his service on November 15, 1988.

From the day till his retirement on September 30, 1989, Erode Municipality paid Mr. Krishnasamy on a time scale basis for 10 months. The last salary the civic body paid him was Rs. 431.

Thereafter, the civic body has not paid a paisa to the ex-serviceman, who to date has been fighting for it. He told ‘The Hindu’ on Wednesday that he had petitioned everybody concerned to no avail.

One of his petitions did evoke a response in that the government issued an order dated December 29, 2006 directing the municipality to clear his dues. But then the order failed to evoke a response from the officials. Mr. Krishnasamy says at 79 he has been fighting for the past 19 years and is fast losing hope and requests the corporation officials to clear his dues at the earliest.

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