Bengaluru prisoners pending wages to be cleared soon

Bengaluru: The inmates of Central Jail (Parappana Agrahara) waiting since September 2016 to receive their wages will soon receive their pay with the government approving the release of about Rs 84 lakh from the state treasury to the Karnataka Employees Benevolent Fund Bangalore for disbursal of the pending salaries.

After jail officials stopped paying the prisoners their wages citing technical problems, the prisoners had staged several protests. “With the new system introduced in 2016, the wages are to be deposited into the prisoners’ bank accounts. We had managed to open accounts for several prisoners at SBI’s Singasandra Branch but were unable to do so for everyone. This resulted in the stopping of payment,” informed a senior officer from the prisons department.

Somashekar, superintendent of Central Prison, recently wrote to the government saying the financial year (2017-18) was coming to end and the problem of pending wages was not yet solved. On March 23^rd, a government order permitted the release of pending wages to the Karnataka Employees Benevolent Fund, Bangalore account. However, this is a one-time relaxation and in the future payments are to be transferred to prisoners’ bank accounts, inform sources.

The inmate wages are paid in three slabs which is a fixed pay set by the prison department. The payment are set as Rs 70 per day for unskilled prisoners, Rs 80 for skilled and Rs 90 for highly skilled. But, there will be a daily deduction of Rs 40 as the prisoner’s daily expenditure in jail.