Kolkata Municipal Corporation employees face uncertainty over salary arrears and a proposed 20% dearness allowance after a central server failure disrupted municipal services and left the e-KMC 2.0 portal non-functional for about 20 days, Sangbad Pratidin reported on Thursday.
The disruption has affected the processing of updated salary records for permanent and contractual employees. According to the report, September salaries were deposited using an older employee list held by the bank after the corporation could not use the e-KMC 2.0 system to process the updated pay structure.
Employees whose salaries increased after promotions reportedly did not receive the additional arrears due to them. The report said the affected staff received their basic salary through the older list, but the timing of payments for promotion-linked arrears remains unclear.
The server outage has also raised questions about the proposed 20% increase in dearness allowance. The report said government employees are expected to receive the increased DA along with their current-month salary on October 14 and 15, following an announcement by the chief minister. For the corporation, however, the inactive portal has created uncertainty over how the eligible employee list will be prepared and transmitted to banks.
The KMC has around 33,000 employees, according to the report. If the portal remains unavailable, the corporation may have to rely again on an older bank list or use a special manual process based on instructions from the state government. That could allow salary payments to proceed, but would not by itself resolve the calculation of revised DA or outstanding arrears.
The disruption has extended beyond permanent and contractual staff. Salaries for more than half of the corporation’s 100-day workers for August and September had still not reached their accounts, the report said. Some workers received their payments two days earlier after senior municipal officers intervened and arranged manually prepared salary sheets, but health and sanitation workers under the programme had not been paid as of Thursday.
A section of civic volunteers also did not receive their salary because the pay sheet could not be prepared. The delay highlights how dependent several categories of municipal workers are on the corporation’s central payroll and digital administration systems, even when their employment arrangements differ.
The server failure has simultaneously affected citizen services, which the corporation was unable to restore fully on Thursday. The e-KMC 2.0 portal remained non-operational, while the corporation said a separate server supporting the public welfare camps beginning Thursday would prevent online service disruptions there.
The immediate administrative challenge is to restore the central system while maintaining salary processing through verified manual records. The corporation’s next key test will be whether it can calculate and release the revised DA and pending arrears on schedule, particularly for employees whose records changed after the older bank list was prepared.