RTC employees to be treated as government staffs from January 1, 2020 – Jaganmohan Reddy

Andhra Pradesh State Road Transport Corporation (APSRTC) employees to be treated as government staffs from January 1, 2020 – Jaganmohan Reddy

Amaravati: Chief minister Y S Jaganmohan Reddy announced that all Andhra Pradesh State Road Transport Corporation (APSRTC) employees will be treated as government staff from January 1, 2020. He also declared that retirement age of RTC staffers will be increased from 58 to 60 years.

“APSRTC employees wanted to be treated as government employees for long. We are happy to announce that their dreams are becoming reality,” said the chief minister in the assembly on Monday.

About 52,000 APSRTC staff will be absorbed into the newly created Public Transport Department (PTD) in the state government. Although the retirement of age of state government employees has been increased to 60 years by the TDP government soon after the bifurcation, it had however, kept the retirement age of employees in all the public sector undertakings (PSUs) at 58 years due to pending bifurcation of the corporations between AP and Telangana. In fact, bifurcation of APSRTC was not completed between the two Telugu states due to the litigation over the sharing of assets of the PSUs listed under schedule IX and X in the Reorganization Act.

Setting all such litigations aside, the CM said that the retirement age of APSRTC staff will be enhanced to 60 years soon after their absorption into the PTD. He said that the government will spend Rs 3,600 crore towards salaries of the newly absorbed employees. “We are happy to take the burden as we wanted to keep the employees happy,” said Jagan.

Transport minister Perni Venkataramaiah (Nani) while introducing the bill in the assembly, said that an experts’ committee headed by former APSRTC managing director and retired DGP C Anjaneya Reddy was constituted to look into various issues–financial, legal, technical and logistic–in order to merge the APSRTC into the government soon after Jagan took over the reins of the state.

He said that the committee after studying the issue in-depth had submitted its report with various suggestions as to how to proceed with the issue.

Source: timesofindia.indiatimes