The Uttar Pradesh government has effected changes in its official list of holidays by knocking off two holidays from the 2013 calendar.
The state government has announced a list of 24 holidays when government offices as well as banks in the state will remain closed.
For Holi, in 2013, government employees and banks will observe a two-day holiday since Holika Dahan has been added to the list of holidays.
For Diwali too, there will be a three day holiday since Govardhan Puja and Bhaiyya Dooj have been added to the list of bank holidays.
This year, Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar Jayanti and Raksha Bandhan have also been declared bank holidays.
The state government, with an eye on vote-bank politics, has abolished holidays on Buddha Purnima and Kanshi Ram’s birth anniversary in 2013. Both had been declared holidays by the previous Mayawati government.
Instead, the Samajwadi government has declared public holidays on Vishwakarma Jayanti and Valmiki Jayanti. Both the holidays had been abolished by the BSP government.
In 2012, the state government had assigned 21 holidays to the Negotiable Instruments Act category, which meant that banks would have to remain open on these days even when the government offices remained closed.
Last year, the state government employees had enjoyed a total of 32 holidays but the list has been whittled down to 24 in this year.
Commenting on the issue, a senior Samajwadi minister said that UP enjoys the maximum number of holidays in a year which adversely affects the work culture.
“Most offices observe a five-day week which means 52 Saturday and 52 Sundays are holidays which mean over a 100 days of holidays. Besides, there are 24 public holidays and employees also avail causal leave, medical leave and earn leave. In short, a UP government employee enjoys two days’ leave for every one day that he works. The administrative functioning obviously gets affected and we have to improve the work culture by reducing unnecessary holidays,” he explained.