As recommendation letters from local bodies is mandatory for acquiring basic services like acquisition of citizenship certificates and transfer of land ownership, the strike has seriously affected normal life of people across the country, an official at Ministry of Local Development (MoLD) said. [break]
Prem Bahadur Khapung, chief of land revenue office (LRO) in Dillibazar, said land and housing transactions have almost come to the standstill since the past four days. “We are presently registering only a handful of transactions of the people who had acquired recommendation letters from the local body earlier. Otherwise, our office casts very deserted look,” he informed myrepublica.com.
Situation at other LROs in the Valley is no different. This has landed a big blow to the realty players, who were already facing tough time due to the central bank´s cap on banks´ realty loans exposure and liquidity crunch that raised borrowing rates.
Employees at local bodies, meanwhile, said that they would not revoke their strike unless the government fulfilled all their demands. They have demanded the government to enforce automatic promotion provision for the employees of local body as well, constitute Local Body Service Commission for recruitment of employees at local body and also make all employees working till mid-July, 2009 permanent, among others.
During the talks, MoLD has already agreed to fulfill all demands of the workers, except the demand of making them permanent. But agitating employees said they will not budge on their stance.
“We had already made all employees of local bodies permanent in mid-July, 2002 by amending Local Self Governance Act. We cannot do that now and again,” said the MoLD official, indicating that the government was not ready to bow down to employees on this issue.
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