Thiruvananthapuram: Although the Kerala government had ordered advance payment of salary to all government employees in the three days from August 24-26 ahead of Onam, only half the staff got the payment at the end of the day on Wednesday (August 26).
The government has now directed the treasury to remain open on Friday, a public holiday, to disburse salaries. About 2.5 lakh employees are yet to be paid.
The disbursement has been hampered by delays in submitting bills, malfunctioning of the payroll software SPARK, and problems with the server, officials said.
This time, the treasury received three bills from each government employee for salary, bonus and advance. The server crashed several times due to this overload. If the problem continues in the coming days, then many employees may not get their salaries before Onam.
A new computer server was bought last month at a cost of Rs 2.5 crore to ensure smooth treasury activities. However, the IT department told the treasury that there is no space to set it up. This has thrown a spanner in the plan to introduce many new facilities in the treasury department.
The government has not been able to ensure basic IT facilities even after setting up a company, Kerala IT Infrastructure Limited, to enhance infrastructure in the IT sector. It was in this company that Sivasankar, the former principal secretary of the chief minister and also the former IT secretary, had got gold smuggling case accused Swapna Suresh appointed through unwarranted means.
The treasury has two servers — one is at the State Data Centre-1 at Co-Bank Tower and the other at the Data Centre-2 at Technopark Tejaswini Building.
The eight-year-old servers are not able to handle the quantum of the treasury’s current activities. Earlier, there were 40,000 transactions daily, but now that has doubled. As a result, the servers crash often and disrupt treasury’s functioning for hours.
To solve this problem, the treasury department bought the new server for Rs 2.5 crore from HP after completing several formalities. The server is now lying unused.
Ministers not in SPARK
Ministers and MLAs are not keen on switching to the payroll software SPARK and the treasury should make necessary changes to ensure the payment of their salaries, the Finance Ministry has said.
The direction comes after the treasury director had written to the finance ministry saying payment of salaries to ministers and MLAs could get disrupted as their SDO (self-drawing officer) number and their PEN (permanent employee number), which is issued to all government employees, are the same.
To address this problem, the MLAs and ministers should be paid salaries through SPARK, the treasury director had suggested. But this will not be possible for the time being, the finance ministry said in its reply.
The treasury software was modified this month to ensure that salary bills submitted using the same permanent employee number are not approved twice. Therefore, the MLAs and Ministers can claim salary using either only the PEN or the SDO number and not with both the numbers since the two are the same. If a bill is submitted using the PEN number, then the software will reject bills submitted using the SDO number.
The treasury is planning to issue new SDO numbers to MLAs and ministers as a temporary solution.
