Unpaid for months, Amrapali ex-employees protest outside office

Noida, April 21 (IANS) Scores of ex-employees of real estate giant Amrapali Group on Friday picketed their corporate office here in Sector-62, alleging non-payment of dues for months.

The employees, who were fired during the last one year, were terminated by the group citing falling profits and slump in the real estate sector.

"Some of us haven't received our salaries for last eight-nine months. We have no other means to live and are barely surviving," Prashant Kumar, a site-engineer with the group, told IANS.

Most of the sacked employees comprised engineers, supervisors, construction workers and low-level managers from the firm's construction sites.

The management, on the other hand, said that they have no money to disburse the payments, yet they are paying off the dues gradually, in instalments of Rs 5,000.

"You know about the slump in the real estate market, on top of that demonetisation hit us hard. The situation is not as bad as the workers are saying. We are paying them in instalments and will clear dues as soon as possible," Adarsh Mohan, a representative from Amrapali Group, told IANS.

The workers alleged that around 800 to 1,000 employees were sacked in the last one year, whereas Mohan said it was not more than 200.

The aggrieved ex-employees also said that the cheques they received from the firm have bounced.

"Their cheques are bouncing, we have been cheated by the company. I had to pay my children's school fees by borrowing money from someone else," Sujeet Jha, who had been working for 13 years with the construction firm, told IANS as he showed the dishonoured cheques.

Some workers alleged that even the bio-metric attendance system was rendered dysfunctional months before their sacking, with their presence being marked only manually.

When the son of company's Chairman Anil Kumar Sharma came out to assuage the sloganeering workers, he was heckled and forced to return inside.

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