E-Paper
Supermarket staff travails: The economics is killing
SOMETIME RS 1000 or Rs 1200 while on other occasion Rs 800 per month is what Sushil Tiwari is getting ? call it salary or anything else ? for the last 15 years for working in a super market under the cooperative societies. He had three children ? eldest daughter is marriageable, while one of the sons is doing graduation from science stream and the youngest one is in Intermediate.
SOMETIME RS 1000 or Rs 1200 while on other occasion Rs 800 per month is what Sushil Tiwari is getting — call it salary or anything else — for the last 15 years for working in a super market under the cooperative societies. He had three children — eldest daughter is marriageable, while one of the sons is doing graduation from science stream and the youngest one is in Intermediate.
Sushil had probably never dreamt that working in a cooperative sector would bring more worries than joy for him and his family members when he joined way back in 1968.
Knowing well that their father could do little to improve financial condition of the family despite best of his efforts, they were taking tuitions just to share the burden.
Not only Sushil, but 550 more employees in 46 super markets throughout the State, are facing the same fate. Some of them still have a ray of hope that things would improve while others have lost all hope.
Narrating his tale of woes, Sushil said that he and his wife were not able to take sound sleep due to poor financial resources. “How can we sleep when we have to plan to marry our daughter and continue sons’ higher studies,” Tiwari said.
Lambasting the government policy, Tiwari said if the State Government was not interested to run the consumer sector of cooperative, employees should have been told in advance to look out for another source of income. He said several of his colleagues were in the clutches of moneylenders.
It is worth mentioning that city alone has four cooperative stores, which include at Chunniganj (on Cooperative’s land), Lalbangla (on rent at Rs 547 per month), IIT Complex (on rent) and Power House Panki (on rent of Rs 100). The total business from all four stores comes between Rs 3 to 4 lakh per month, making the net profit of about Rs 25,000 per month.
It may be recalled that these stores were established in 1967 to check exploitation of common man from business community by providing them daily consumable goods at reasonable cost. Besides, they were being used to sell the goods subsidised by the government to take it to the reach of needy people.
Manger of the super markets Shiv Kumar Srivastva said that a proposal had been sent to the government for utilising the prime land measuring 2052 square yard of super market located in Chunniganj. Srivastva said that if this proposal was accepted, then condition of stores and employees might improve to a considerable extent.
Deputy registrar Dhiman Singh said that as per norms of the sector they were to be paid the marginal money from the income of the stores. However, one of the employees Ramesh Chandra Shukla suggested that if government considers merging all employees with good running cooperative bodies, then only some relief was possible.
