Kathmandu, August 28 :

Demanding that they be made permanent, employees of all 35 wards of the Kathmandu Metropolitan City (KMC) and its departments, who have been working on temporary

and contract bases, today staged a two-hour pen-down at their respective offices.

They had staged an hour-long pen-down yesterday as well.

“Though employees of all other 57 municipalities were staging strikes, we had stopped staging strikes, hoping that initiatives will be taken for making us permanent but nothing has happened as of yet.”

Sarbagya Poudel, president of the Kathmandu Metropolitan City (KMC) unit of the Nepal Association of Municipal Employees (NAME), the organiser of the pen-down, said they were forced to stage the strike again as the Kathmandu Metropolitan City management did not begin the process of giving permanent appointment to other employees working on temporary and contract bases.

According to Poudel, a process for making the drivers, peons and sweepers of the KMC is already underway.

However, chief executive officer of the KMC, Dinesh Thapaliya, said the KMC could not give permanent appointment to higher-level employees of the KMC without amending the existing laws.

He added that the agitating employees were against bringing emergency works of the municipality to a halt.