By Sashwata Saha
Asansol, West Bengal: When you enter West Bengal's second-largest city through the arch that reads "Welcome to Asansol, the City of Brotherhood”, the streets look cleaner than they did last month, when overflowing bins buzzed with flies and stray dogs picked through garbage that had accumulated for nearly two weeks. The garbage on main roads had accumulated after a strike by contractual sanitation workers, who stopped work over unpaid provident fund dues.
The sanitation strike that brought the city to a standstill appears to be over.
But three contractual sanitation workers this reporter spoke to on March 9 said that their provident fund arrears have not been cleared. Fresh PF deposits, they added, are also pending.
The strike, which at its peak saw roughly 800 contractual sanitation workers walk off the job on January 30, formally wound down after a February 8 meeting with Asansol Municipal Corporation (AMC) authorities produced promises of action. A handful of remaining protesters were dispersed by authorities on February 16.
More than a month later, however, workers say their dues remain unsettled. Since the end of the strike, most have been working only a few days each week, leaving residents in a lurch as garbage piled up outside homes.
Local resident Madhurima Dutta said collection has taken place only once or twice a week over the past month.
“This is unacceptable,” she said. “If this continues, it could lead to disease or an epidemic. Then the municipality will be to blame.”
A deduction that disappeared
Contractual sanitation labourers employed by the AMC are paid Rs 360 per day, with Rs 50 deducted as PF contribution, a facility introduced in early 2025. According to Nabendu Dasgupta, convenor of the All India Central Council for Trade Unions, workers have complained for 13 months that despite these deductions being made, the money has not been deposited into their Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) accounts.
In late January, a group of workers visited the EPFO's sub-regional office in neighbouring Durgapur to verify their accounts and found that deposits had stopped after March 2025. That amounts to over Rs 15,000 in undeposited PF contributions per worker. Trade union leaders estimate the total arrears for sanitation workers alone could run between Rs 1 crore and Rs 1.3 crore.
Where this money has gone, whether it remains with the AMC, with private contractors, or was never remitted, is unclear. AMC officials, when asked, said they did not know. Opposition politicians claim the funds are sitting with the AMC and contractors.
This reporter has filed RTI applications with both the AMC and the EPFO sub-regional office seeking clarity. The applications were filed on March 5. Responses are awaited. The EPFO declined to comment on the matter.
A repeated explanation
When workers began protesting in January, a senior official at the municipal sanitation department offered an explanation under anonymity: most contractual staff, the official said, were not tech-savvy, had struggled with KYC forms, or had submitted incomplete documentation when EPFO accounts were set up. "IT issues" had further slowed things down.
This explanation has been offered before. In July 2025, nearly all 4,028 AMC employees (370 permanent and 3,658 contractual), across departments, not just sanitation, staged protests alleging that the corporation had been deducting 12% of salaries as PF contributions for two years without remitting the amounts to EPFO.
The AMC's response then was the same: KYC problems, documentation gaps and technical delays. After months of protests, the AMC announced in December 2025 that all arrears had been cleared. Some contractual workers, however, say that even in March 2026, their accounts from that period remain irregular.
This makes the current sanitation workers' dispute the third time in twelve months that the AMC has faced nearly identical allegations, and responded with almost identical reasoning.
Deputy Mayor Amarnath Chatterjee told the press after the February 8 meeting: "The PF issue was a big misunderstanding on both sides that we hope we have put behind us. We are helping everyone with their documents and with PF and ESI facilities. We will issue identity cards by this week and standard gear will be issued soon, too.” Since then, the AMC has floated tenders to procure safety gear and identity cards, indicating movement on two of the workers’ four demands.
So far, some sanitation workers have been provided with surgical masks and thick rubber gloves. Those who received the equipment said it has “slightly improved” their working conditions, as they no longer have to handle waste with bare hands or flimsy gloves. The masks, they added, have made the stench “more tolerable”.
Mayor Bidhan Upadhyay, at a press conference, said Asansol pays sanitation workers more than any other city in West Bengal, and assured that the accounts department was looking into the immediate disbursal of arrears. He added that any increase in remuneration was a state government decision. This was his third such assurance since January 30.
In the week between the February 8 meeting and the February 16 dispersal of protesters, workers said they saw no concrete action from the AMC, prompting a second round of protests.
More than a month on, while there has been some progress on safety gear and identity cards, there has been no public update on the clearance of provident fund arrears, the central demand that triggered the strike in January.
The city that cannot afford to talk
Asansol sits at the centre of West Bengal’s industrial belt — a city of 16 lakh people that generates around 700 tonnes of waste daily across 106 municipal wards. The Asansol Municipal Corporation employs over 800 sanitation workers in total, including around 300 permanent staff, while a far larger contractual workforce is hired through private third parties. An RTI filed on March 5 seeks details of these contractors.
When the strike was at its peak, members of the Asansol North Assembly Youth Congress staged a protest outside the mayor’s office. After he declined to meet them, they pasted photographs of overflowing garbage bins on his chamber doors along with a memorandum.
The organisation’s president, Gaurab Roy, warned that if the issue was not resolved, the administration would be responsible for any resulting public health crisis.
With state elections approaching, the political dimension has sharpened. Krishnendu Mukherjee, a member of the state BJP committee, alleged that the sanitation crisis stemmed from infighting within the Trinamool Congress.
“This entire crisis was brought about due to a fracture in the Trinamool system,” he said. “There is not a single department in the Asansol Municipal Corporation that is not corrupt. Now they have come down to deprive poor sanitation workers of their hard-earned money.”
Local Trinamool worker Sharnendu Sen argued that even without provident fund payments, sanitation workers’ daily wages amount to “good compensation”.
“This government also has schemes like Kanyashree, Lakshmi’r Bhandar, and Yuvashree, which benefit these workers’ families directly,” he said. “I don’t think people will forget that impact when they visit the booth.”
This article was originally published in 101 Reporters under Creative Common license. Read the original article.
(GP)
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