Power engineers hold candlelight march Kuldip Bhatia Ludhiana, March 26 Led by activists of the PSEB Engineers Association (PSEBEA), power engineers held a candlelight march at the central zone office of Punjab State Power Corporation Limited (PSPCL) here today. Later, the protesting engineers intended to march towards the Sarabha Nagar Market to apprise the public of the wrong polices of the Punjab government and the PSPCL management. However, the police intervened and persuaded them to confine the protest to the PSPCL zonal headquarters. Addressing the protesters, Baldev Singh Sran, Bhupinder Singh and Sanjeev Sood, president, vice-president and general secretary, respectively, of the PSEBEA, said the power com management and the state government had gone out of the way to grant extension to the chairman and managing director (CMD) of the PSPCL in violation of the tripartite agreement (TPA). “The upper age limit of the CMD has been unilaterally extended from 62 to 65 years, which is a violation of the tripartite agreement signed by the government at the time of unbundling of the erstwhile PSEB,” the protesting engineers said. They further said the TPA was also not being honoured in other issues such as common seniority, cadre and differential in pay scales of the employees for which the association had been constantly pursuing with the government and the PSPCL management for more than a year. Sran said instead, the government had violated all its commitments and had granted lower pay scales to the newly recruited assistant engineers than their existing counterparts, which was illogical, unethical and unjustified. The engineers also highlighted several other issues like total dependence on private sector for new power generation projects, huge financial losses caused due to delay in commissioning of new projects, shortage of staff, which was affecting efficiency and failure of the power corporations to cut down transmission and distribution losses. Deploring the management for issuing threats and putting pressure on the engineers to sign resolutions for favouring age extension, they made it clear that the power engineers would not tolerate the injustice and would give a befitting reply to such nefarious designs of the state government and the PSPCL management. Among others present on the occasion were HC Kamboj, Jaswant Zaffar, Bhupinder Khosal, Sukhbir Singh and GPMS Sidhu.
Posted on: Thu, 27 Mar 2014 00:20:59 +0000
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