The YSR Congress party government in Andhra Pradesh had to face an embarrassing situation with thousands of employees not getting their salaries on Thursday, supposedly due to technical snags.
Normally, state government employees get their salaries on the first day of every month. On Thursday, the first day of August, many employees could not get their salaries even after the closure of office hours at 5 pm.
This has led to the speculations that the Jagan Mohan Reddy government is facing severe financial crunch and that the salaries might get delayed further this month.
Within no time, this rumour spread like a wild fire among the employees and into the social media.
Some television channels picked up the rumours being spread in social media and splashed the news, causing huge embarrassment to the Jagan government.
On Friday afternoon, finance minister Buggana Rajendranath himself had to clarify that the delay had nothing to do with the funds availability.
He said there had been a technical issue relating to the encryption of files with e-Kuber platform of the Reserve Bank of India, Mumbai.
He said on Thursday, after the payment of pensions and large part of the salaries, technical difficulties were experienced leading to stoppage of uploading of the files.
“The staff of the finance department have continuously worked throughout the night to resolve the issue coordinating with the technical staff of RBI, Mumbai,” he said.
Buggana said the issue had been fully resolved by the technical team and all pensions and salaries are credited to the respective bank account by 10.00 am on Friday.
“I would like to reiterate that this delay has nothing to do with the funds position. The little technical glitch is fully resolved in consultation with RBI and measures to ensure that the fix is permanent and will not repeat in future have been taken,” he clarified.
