21 September 2018: Panchkula Municipal Corporation has made it mandatory for its sanitation workers to wear GPS enabled wrist watches, which according to the Municipal Commissioner will help in recording attendance of sanitary workers shift-wise, prevention and control of misuse of manual attendance system, maintenance of transparency, accountability in operations and weeding out fake, duplicate and false workers.
The Municipal Corporation will pay a rental of ₹2400 per watch per year which is one third of a contract Safai Karmchari’s wage. Unions are opposing the move pointing that the expense is wasteful in the light of non-payment of timely wages to contract workers and denial of social security to contract workers.