Thiruvananthapuram: A technical error derailed the government’s move to disburse the revised salary and pension before the polls on the first day itself.
Despite being Good Friday, all treasuries in State were functional, but a technical glitch in the server hampered the disbursement till noon. Thousands of current and former government servants across Kerala were forced to return disappointed.
The pension was disbursed to only those who waited till 1.30pm from the morning.
The government’s move to distribute the pension and salaries in four days without augmenting the web server’s capacity led to the glitch. The server has been overloaded for the past 18 months.
Normally, the salary and pension are disbursed as and when the bills are submitted during the first half of every month. The government, however, anticipated that the distribution of the revised salary and pension ahead of the polling day would boost its election prospects.
Accordingly, the Treasury Director cancelled the holiday and directed the treasury staff to process the bills and disburse the salary and pension between April 2 and 5. Polling in Kerala is on April 6.
Considering the server’s low capacity, the employees were also instructed to get and pass the bills in March itself.
Problems with the server and malfunctioning of the payroll software SPARK had hit salary disbursement during last Onam.
The treasury has two servers — one is at the State Data Centre-1 at CoBank Tower and the other at the Data Centre-2 at Tejaswini Building at the Technopark.
The servers are 9 years old and are reportedly unable to handle the quantum of the activities handled by the state treasury. Until early last year, there were 40,000 transactions daily, but now that has doubled. As a result, the servers crash often and disrupt the treasury’s functioning for hours.
