Power staff protest outside chairman’s residence : The Tribune India

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Power staff protest outside chairman’s residence

LUDHIANA:Employees of Punjab State Power Corporation Limited (PSPCL) led by activists of the PSEB Employees’ Federation (AITUC) today held a protest outside the residence of KD Chaudhry, chairman and managing director of the power utility in Rajguru Nagar locality here.

Power staff protest outside chairman’s residence

Power employees take out a protest march in presence of policemen deployed outside the residence of the PCPCL chairman-cum-managing director in Ludhiana on Sunday. photo: inderjeet verma



Our Correspondent

Ludhiana, May 29

Employees of Punjab State Power Corporation Limited (PSPCL) led by activists of the PSEB Employees’ Federation (AITUC) today held a protest outside the residence of KD Chaudhry, chairman and managing director of the power utility in Rajguru Nagar locality here.

The protesting employees charged the PSPCL top brass of persistently ignoring their demands and adopting an adamant attitude towards them.

Satnam Singh Chaleri and Jagdish Sharma, president and general secretary, respectively, of the PSEB Employees’ Federation, said with ban on new recruitment, more than 40,000 posts were lying vacant and as a result the staff had been overburdened. At times, the employees have to put in 14 to 16 hours duty like bonded labour, they said adding that employees were forced to work at higher posts without being promoted.

Other speakers at the rally condemned the outsourcing of technical work to contractual labour which was causing problems in the field while the contractors were fleecing the workers by paying them nominal wages. “The management has also backed out from regularisation of cashiers, metre readers, bill distributors and mail runners who have been working for last many years,” they alleged.

Meanwhile, trade union leaders lambasted the PSPCL management for gross injustice inflicted upon the employees by denial of increase in pay band, which had been granted to the state government employees in November 2011. They also took exception to the decision of purchasing power from private thermal power projects by partly or fully shutting down power plants in the public sector thereby, causing a huge financial drain on the revenue of the power utility.

The PSPCL management further came under sharp criticism for failure to regularise more than 800 work charged employees with 12 to 14 years of service, denial of benefit of grade pay from November 2011, one special annual increment and mobile allowance, which had been granted to regular Class IV employees.

Other demands raised by the power employees were ex-gratia grants of Rs 5 lakh in cases of death by accident, grant of conveyance allowance equivalent to cost of 30 litre petrol per month to field staff, withdrawal of ban on recruitment on compassionate grounds, removal of flaws in the cashless insurance scheme for serving and retired employees and concessional power supply to retired employees.

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