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D Jose in Thiruvananthapuram
People are wary of visiting government offices in Kerala these days with the Congress-led United Democratic Front government imposing a strange task of selling lottery tickets on the beleaguered state government employees.
People visiting these offices for any work are greeted by employees with tickets of 'Akshayanidhi', a bumper lottery launched by the government for filling the empty Chief Minister's Relief Fund.
The government, which intends to mobilise Rs 100 million through the lottery, has given the employees a target of selling four million tickets of Rs 50 each in the next few weeks.
The target is achievable as Kerala has about a half a million employees, many of whom are unemployed according to the government's own admissions.
But some employees have expressed reservation over the government's decision.
"How can the government entrust this task with the employees when it is trying to reform bureaucracy to face modern challenges and to check corruption. The task given to the employees will certainly encourage corruption. With this the government will lose its moral right to take action against the employees for wrong-doings," a senior employee at the government secretariat in Thiruvananthapuram said.
In fact, this type of extra official tasks are not new to the government employees in Kerala, where many ruling constituents use the employees for mobilising funds for their political activities.
A vehicle inspector from Thrissur, who was recently caught accepting bribes, was found carrying a receipt book of a political party.
Chief Minister A K Antony had issued strict instructions to workers of his party and its partners in the UDF not to use employees for collecting funds in the wake of this incident. But most parties still continue to use employees of select departments for filling their coffers.
The Communist Party of India, Marxist, which has a larger penetration among employees, has been depending mostly on employees for collecting funds for its various ventures.
The party had invested huge sums of money on various projects, including a television channel, luxury flats for state committee members, an air-conditioned auditorium, hospitals and tourist resorts during its last term between 1996 and 2001.
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