Tension at GHMC office; contractors protest over payment of Rs-1,000 crore pending bills

HYDERABAD: Tension prevailed at the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) office on Tuesday, when the GHMC contractors’ association along with their family members staged a demonstration and demanded payment of pending bills to a tune of Rs 1,000 crore to them.

Raising slogans and holding ‘No Payment – No Work’ signs, the members of the Association said that if their pending bills were not cleared immediately then all work would be suspended. A tense atmosphere prevailed for a while at the GHMC office, when, all of a sudden, the GHMC contractors along with their family members tried to lay a siege to the GHMC office for delay in payment of pending bills.

With the situation going out of control, the police arrested several GHMC contractors and shifted them to other locations to restore normalcy in the place. “For the last eight months, bills pertaining to different development works have not been cleared. Right from executing various works including repairing of BT potholes, CC roads, desilting of drains across 150 divisions in GHMC. With delay in payments, all these works are being carried out by availing loans and pledging gold ornaments. As a result, contractors are unable to pay salaries to their employees and are suffering financial losses,” said association secretary Surendra Singh.

Surendra Singh said that not even a single corporator or official was bothered about the hardships being faced by the contractors due to delay in payment of pending bills. "In case the contractors refuse to take up the development works in the city citing the payment delay, the officials threaten to keep us on the block list," he said. On several occasions, the issue of pending bills was discussed with the GHMC officials and Mayor Gadwal Vijayalakshmi.

Every month, the GHMC was paying a meager Rs 30 crore to the contractors. In such a case, it may take several years for the GHMC to clear all the pending bills to the contractors. "We are appealing to GHMC to fix a time bound to clear all our dues, considering the plight of the contractors. If not, we will intensify our agitation by stopping the ongoing development works in the city," Surendra Singh said