Kolkata, Feb 16,2023: West Bengal Governor C.V. Ananda Bose on Thursday assured the state government employees demanding their pending dearness allowance (DA) arrears that he will send a detailed report to the Union government on this count.

The Governor gave the assurance after an interaction with a four-member delegation of the joint forum of state government employees agitating in the matter.

The four members of the delegation were Tapas Chakroborty, Aniruddha Bhattacharya, Deepal Biswas and Sandip Ghosh. Later, BJP MP from Ranaghat, Jagannath Sarkar, also attended the meeting.

The delegation submitted a memorandum about their demands to the Governor. After the meeting, the delegation members told mediapersons that the Governor has assured them of sending a detailed report on this count to the Union government.

“We apprised the Governor about the entire situation, and he agreed with us that depriving state government employees of DA arrears is inhuman. Previously also, we had sent a letter on this count to the Governor,” said Bhattacharya.

Sarkar said that he did not join the meeting as an elected representative of a particular political party.

“I am myself a retired teacher under the payroll of the state government and I had also been deprived of DA arrears. This is our legitimate right. The DA received by the state government employees is the lowest among all Indian states,” he said.

The joint forum of state government employees has already announced that it will observe a full-day pen-down strike on February 20 and February 21.

While presenting the state Budget in the Assembly on Wednesday, Minister of State for Finance, Chandrima Bhattacharya, had announced an additional 3 per cent DA for the current and pension-holding retired state government employees.

However, the announcement irked the state government employees further, who pointed out that even after this additional 3 per cent, their gap with their counterparts in the Union government will remain at 32 per cent.