Death during rural poll duty: Decks cleared for ex-gratia to kin of Covid victims

Lucknow: The decks have been cleared for ex-gratia of ₹30 lakh each to the families of 2020 government personnel who died of Covid-19 during duty in the panchayat elections in April-May

Lucknow: The decks have been cleared for ex-gratia of ₹30 lakh each to the families of 2020 government personnel who died of Covid-19 during duty in the panchayat elections in April-May.

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The panchayati raj department has sent the list of all such employees to the state election commission, asking it to provide ₹30 lakh each to their dependents as per the government policy.

“A total of 3078 applications were received through district magistrates for compensation after the government issued revised guidelines in this regard on June 1 and 2020 claims were found to be genuine,” additional chief secretary, panchayati raj, Manoj Kumar Singh said.

He said the government had already made ₹300 crore available to the commission.

Earlier in May, the state cabinet cleared a proposal seeking amendments to the rules to change the definition of poll duty to cover more and more claimants. The previous rules covered the election poll period of only one day—the day when the staff did the election duty.

The government increased the election duty period from one day to 30 days which meant if any staff died of Covid within 30 days of the election duty, his family would be entitled to ₹30 lakh ex-gratia payment as compensation. Under the guidelines existing then, only 74 personnel were found to have died during poll duty, 40 of them due to pandemic.

Kumar said 50% of the personnel who died of Covid-19 in poll duty were teachers. “Of the 11 lakh employees deployed for poll duty, around 6 lakh were teachers,” he said, giving the reason for higher of number of deaths of teachers.