Some protests are about anger. This one was about exhaustion. Members of the All J&K Road Transport Corporation (JKRTC) Voluntarily Retired Employees Association gathered outside the Press Club of Jammu to do what they have done, in one form or another, for more than a decade: ask for money they have already earned.
The Demand
Led by Association President Dev Raj Bali, the retired workers condemned the administrative bottlenecks within the J&K UT Finance and Transport Departments that have kept their settlements frozen. The list of withheld dues is long and specific: Cost of Living Allowance (COLA) adjustments, 6th Pay Commission arrears, pending leave salary, dearness allowance, and gratuity — entitlements that have been stuck in bureaucratic channels for close to 12 years.
These are not workers asking for a raise. They are retirees asking for the legally settled terms of their own retirement.
The Human Cost
The statistic the association keeps returning to is the one that should end the debate: roughly 78 voluntarily retired transport workers have died during this prolonged wait — some, the association says, unable to afford medical treatment they might have managed had their dues been released. Each name on that list leaves behind a family that was counting on a payout that never came.
According to the association, the JKRTC's current Managing Director has distanced the management from the status of the files — prompting the protesters to take their demand over the corporation's head entirely. They are now calling for direct intervention from the Lieutenant Governor's office and the Chief Minister's secretariat to clear bills that, by their account, are already prepared and simply waiting to be cleared.
Why It Matters Beyond the Retired
It would be easy to file this as a story about pensioners. It isn't only that. In a city where many young people are navigating a tight job market and leaning on family support, withheld retirement wealth doesn't stay contained to one generation. It drains household savings, and that strain trickles down — shrinking what a family can put toward a child's higher education, a first business, or basic economic mobility.
There's a lesson here, too, for any young Jammuite weighing a secure-looking government job against moving elsewhere for work: the security of public-sector employment is only as real as the system that pays out at the end of it. For 78 families, that system has so far failed to deliver.
Primary source: Daily Excelsior.
