Chandigarh, May 21
The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) senior leader and Deputy Leader of Opposition in the Punjab Assembly, Saravjit Kaur Manuke said that due to the persistence of the Captain Amarinder Singh-led Congress government, the sanitation services in Punjab were disrupted during the Covid-19 pandemic. She appealed to Chief Minister Captain Amarinder Singh to immediately accept the demands of the sanitation workers and end the strike. In a statement issued from the party headquarters here on Friday, MLA Saravjit Kaur Manuke said that for the last few days the sanitation workers had been on strike at the call of the Municipal Employees Action Committee, Punjab, to enforce their demands from the government.
Manuke said that in many cities of Punjab, the sanitation workers had stopped cleaning and picking up waste leading to piling up of garbage near markets and hospitals. “This has led to the risk of spread of many other diseases during the Covid period,” she added. Manunke said that the lives of the people of Punjab were already in danger due to the Covid pandemic, but now with the disruption of the sanitation system; the risk of pandemic was much higher. She said that piles of garbage in city markets and near hospitals had made it difficult for the people to breathe.
Taking a dig at the Captain-led Congress government, Manuke said that the Punjab government was neither paying attention to the safety of the lives of the common people nor taking action to address the problems of the employees of the state. She said that today employees of various government departments and agencies were struggling to get their demands met but Chief Minister Captain Amarinder Singh and his ministers and MLAs were fighting to save their respective seats. “The general public of Punjab is being punished due to the Captain government’s stance of not heeding the demands of the Safai Sevak Union,” she added. Manuke said that the Punjab government should immediately accept the demands of the sanitation workers and implement them so that they could end their strike and cleanliness could be maintained in the cities of Punjab.
