With the city Corporation staff being deployed for preparatory work for the local body elections, including updation of electoral rolls, the civic body faces a severe crunch of staff for COVID-related activities.
The civic body has requested the District Collector to redeploy staff from other departments, as is being done in COVID first-line treatment centres (FLTCs) and institutional quarantine centres run by local bodies in other districts.
As per the schedule published by the State Election Commission, the draft voters’ list in local bodies has to be published by August 12. Objections can be filed till October 26. Hearing these objections and updation of the voters’ list have to be completed by September 23 and the final list has to be published by September 26.
In a large local body such as the city Corporation with lakhs of voters, these are time consuming activities requiring a large number of staff for field-level inspections. This schedule also means that the staff will be on their toes for a good part of the next two months. The Corporation at present runs nine FLTCs and 34 institutional quarantine centres.
Along with the regular staff of the health wing, including health inspectors and junior health inspectors, the Corporation has now deployed bill collectors and other staff from revenue and other wings at the FLTCs and quarantine centres.
The bill collectors and revenue staff, along with junior health inspectors, are the ones who are used the most for electoral roll-related works, as they have a clear idea of their respective wards.
The Corporation has appointed junior health inspectors and other health staff as charge officers in the FLTCs in three shifts of eight hours each. In addition, cleaning staff are also being deployed at the rate of one for every ten beds.
In the larger FLTCs like the Greenfield stadium, five charge officers are deployed at a time. But, if at least one staff in a shift tests positive for SARS-CoV-2, as it happened two weeks back, all of the staff on duty during that time have to go in quarantine.
“In some other districts, the staff from other departments have been redeployed for working in FLTCs and institutional quarantine centres. This will reduce the load on us and allow us to deploy more of our staff for electoral roll-related work. Something similar needs to be done in Thiruvananthapuram too,” said a Corporation official.
