Chennai, March 31
Life came to a standstill for 12 hours in Tamil Nadu today following a bandh call given by the ruling DMK and its allies in protest against the Supreme Court judgement staying the 27 per cent reservation for OBCs in elite educational institutions.
As the state government had declared today as a public holiday, all government offices were closed and buses belonging to the Tamil Nadu State Transport Corporation did not ply. Private vehicles and auto-rickshaws were also off the road.
As many as 26 flights were cancelled during the 12 hours of general strike and many air passengers who landed at the airport after 6 am were stranded and had to spend their day at the lounge.
All long distance trains leaving the three railway stations here were either cancelled or rescheduled.
All private sector offices, including banks and IT offices, remained closed.
However, the bandh did not have much impact on the IT sector as most of the IT companies function for five days a week.
However, it did affect the industry as a majority of the workers could not turn up for work. At the Ambattur industrial estate on the outskirts of the city, all medium and small scale units remained closed. They will operate tomorrow to compensate today's loss of work.
The only exception was the Chennai Port which functioned as usual with cargo handling.
K. Suresh, chairman, Chennai Port Trust, said, "Except for our external operations, no other work has been disrupted at the port. Ships had arrived earlier and there is no problem in handling cargo. We have started offloading cargo from the ships."
Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi thanked the people for making the general strike "total and successful" and expressing their solidarity with the backward classes.
There are 254 categories of OBCs in Tamil Nadu which has a reservation of 69 per cent for OBCs and the scheduled castes and tribes in educational institutions, the highest in the country.
