A day after The Indian Express reported on the high mortality rate in Class IV employees of Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC), it has come to light that the LIC had discontinued its group insurance scheme for these workers from July 10 this year.

Reason? The increasing number of deaths of conservancy staff was putting pressure on the risk of life cover.

“We discontinued the scheme as LIC was running into heavy losses as the death ratio was on the rise. We made a counter-offer of increasing the premium but it was not accepted so we scrapped the scheme,” said Nilesh Sathe, country head and chief of group schemes for the public sector insurance firm.

Meanwhile, PMC responded to yesterday’s story in The Indian Express with a press note that said only 189 employees had died during the last two years — from October 2005 to September 2007 — and not 227 employees in the last 30 months as reported. It said that of the 189, one was a Class I employee, two were of Class II, 26 of Class III, and 159 of Class IV. The number of deaths among conservancy staff — engaged in garbage and sewage work — was only 108, it said.

But the PMC Employee Welfare department’s register, shown to The Indian Express yesterday, did not give this break-up: it only mentioned 107 deaths in 2006-07 and 40 deaths in the first six months of 2007-08. When specifically asked about the deaths in 2005-06, the reporter was told there were 80 and the figure was yet to be entered in the register. In all, that works out to 227 deaths in 30 months — as was reported.

... contd.