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BSNL union leader K Sebastian said they’d meet the MTNL and said they’d like to “understand the government’s plans to revive our companies.”
- Lunch-hour demonstrations will be held at New Delhi’s Sanchar Bhawan Gate and the telecom office of ED Mumbai on October 10. The protest sites for October 16 are the CGO Complex in New Delhi and the ED Mumbai Telecom Office.
Employee unions of Mahanagar Telecom Nigam (MTNL) and Bharat Sanchar Nigam (BSNL) have threatened a national strike after Diwali if their wages are not paid, said the Times of India.
Union leaders for both the telecom companies in the public sector said wages were pending for August and September.
“Is it just before Diwali this fair? When our problems aren’t fixed early, we won’t be sitting idle. We are even going to take our protest to the Office of the Prime Minister (PMO),’ the newspapers quoted as saying Dharamraj Singh, convenor of the MTNL unions and associations forum.
BSNL union leader K Sebastian said they’d meet the MTNL and said they’d like to “understand the government’s plans to revive our companies.”
The report quoted government sources as saying that the Ministry of Telecom was working on a plan that had been discussed with the PMO.
Scroll.in announced that on October 10 and October 16, employees of both companies would stage lunch-hour demonstrations in Mumbai and New Delhi.
Lunch-hour demonstrations will be held at New Delhi’s Sanchar Bhawan Gate and the telecom office of ED Mumbai on October 10. The protest sites for October 16 are the CGO Complex in New Delhi and the ED Mumbai Telecom Office.
In addition to paying wages, MTNL workers often ask not to change the retirement age from 60 to 50 years. They are also rejecting the merger of cash-strapped MTNL and BSNL.
The government officially ruled out MTNL and BSNL’s disinvestment as it thinks there will be no takers for the state-run units with a distressing process going through the telecom sector.
The Telecom Department (DoT) has been planning a rescue plan for both companies for some time now in the form of a turnaround package containing components such as voluntary retirement scheme, asset monetization, and 4 G spectrum allocation.
As part of efforts to revive the ailing state-owned telecom firms, the DoT is also said to consider a plan for the merger of the two PSUs.
The loss of BSNL is projected at around Rs 14,000 crore in 2018-19, with revenue decreasing to Rs 19,308 crore.
The provisional loss of the public sector business was Rs 4,859 in 2015-16, Rs 4,793 in 2016-17, Rs 7,993 in 2017-18 and is expected to swell to Rs 14,202 in 2018-19.
Recently, Chairman of BSNL, Pravin Kumar Purwar said in an interview that around 50 percent of the employees from the state-run telecom carrier will be asked to leave as voluntary retirement.
The government is planning something and it will be important to see what comes as a rescue plan for both the suffering entities.
