Kathmandu, February 7

The Ministry of Federal Affairs and Local Development has reached an eight-point agreement with the agitating VDC Secretaries Rights Protection Committee to end the latter’s protests.

With the signing of the accord, the VDC secretaries, who had been staging protests for the past six days, called off all their protest programmes and returned to work.

As per the agreement, the MoFALD will formally write to the government to hold civic polls immediately to ease the work burden of civil servants at the local level. Similarly, the VDC secretaries will be entitled to incentives with effect from July 15.

Other agreements include consultation with the authorised trade union by the concerned ministries while integrating civil servants at local, provincial, and federal levels and creating an environment for the existing VDC secretaries to work in related village councils or municipalities in the federal setup.

The agreement has also stated that the MoFALD would formulate a criteria within 15 days to pave the way for VDC secretaries’ transfer. The accord was signed by Chakra Bahadur Budha, MoFALD joint secretary, and Damodar Rijal, VSRPC chairperson, following talks held at Singha Durbar yesterday.

Secretaries of as many as 3,015 VDCs had been staging protests on the premises of their concerned District Development Committee offices, demanding that the government implement an earlier agreement.

Though the government had endorsed the agreement to introduce performance-based incentives, it was only implemented for the first three months of the current fiscal. The government was supposed to continue providing an incentive of at least 40 to 50 per cent of the basic salary to VDC secretaries on the basis of performance.