Surprise: Thanks to 'labour gangs', some FCI loaders earn Rs 4 lakh per month

You may have thought that one needs to get an MBA degree from a foreign university to earn a six-figure salary every month. Well you’re up for a surprise. According to reports, some labourers at the Food Corporation of India are earning a salary of up to Rs 4 lakh a month. And, many of these labourers rake in that much money without even breaking a sweat. So, how do these labourers earn more than double of what the FCI chairman-cum-managing director gets? It’s the faulty system that is leading such abuse of government funds. [caption id=“attachment_1067245” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Reuters[/caption] According to a previous Times of India report, “labour gangs” at FCI are responsible for this enormously high salary of the labourers. The strong union have flourished under the faulty system where state funds are used to pay them eyebrow-raising wages, including allowances, reports the newspaper. An Indian Express article from 2013 noted that ‘proxy labourers’ are earning so much salary, without even working. It noted that many FCI depots cannot employ contract labour. “This leaves the loading job at these depots with about 3,000 permanent workers. These workers don’t do the entire work themselves and employ others, who are neither on FCI roll nor contract workers. These casual workers are not paid commensurately by the ‘master labourers’ on the roll, whose peak monthly wages often exceed even R 2 lakh,” says the report. A ToI report notes, in August 2014 that 370 workers received more than Rs 4 lakh in wages, incentives, arrears and overtime allowance. Another 386 workers received between Rs 2 lakh and 2.50 lakh in the same month. Senior BJP leader and Kangra MP Shanta Kumar, also a former Union food and civil supplies minister, who has prepared a report on the restructuring of the FCI, told Hindustan Times that these labourers should be given voluntary retirement. The report, according to HT, notes that each loader, a permanent employee of the FCI, earns an average salary of Rs 79,500. That is equivalent to that of senior category-1 officers like assistant and deputy general managers. In an interview to _Firstpost_ , Kumar said that the level of corruption at the FCI is frightening. “We have tried to remove the root causes of corruption,” he said. On the issue of strong union at FCI, Kumar said, “When its workload is reduced, then there will be pruning of staff. We have said zonal offices should be trimmed over time. In the case of the departmental loaders, we have recommended a voluntary retirement scheme and phasing them out. This will have to done gradually over time.”