Mumbai: BEST employees protest over unfulfilled ‘Shiv Sena promise’

BEST employees protested in their hundreds at Azad Maidan

The responsibility of the BEST Undertaking should be taken up by the BMC as decided by the Memorandum of Understanding which noted that their budgets should be merged - refused permission for a morcha from Byculla to Mantralaya to highlight this issue, hundreds of BEST employees filled Azad Maidan on Wednesday to push for the demands.

"The merger of the BEST budget with the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) budget will be the final solution to the undertaking's financial problems. It was Shiv Sena's promise, we just reminded them," Shashank Sharad Rao, convener, BEST Workers Joint Action Committee said.

"There was an MoU between the BMC commissioner, BEST general manager, and the workers' union in the month of June 2019 that it would be the responsibility of the BMC to take care of all day-to-day expenses of the undertaking. Also, the BEST committee and BMC had sanctioned the proposal of the merger of the budget. But the Maharashtra government is not clearing the proposal. So, today employees gathered in large numbers demanding that all this be done immediately," BEST committee member Sunil Ganacharya, who attended the rally, said.

"The BEST has been working as the city's lifeline in the absence of local trains and has not stopped even a single day. Its workers have given their lives to the undertaking and what the BMC budget has done is injustice," he said.