Haryana power engineers to agitate for their demands

Power engineers in Haryana have decided to agitate after 45 days in case their pending demands are not fulfilled by that time.

CJ: V K Gupta Fri, Jun 24, 2011
POWER Engineers Association has decided to launch an agitation in case their demands, pending for more than 2 years, are not fulfilled.

The executive committee meeting was held today in Karnal and attended by representatives of all the four power utilities, including all engineers posted in the zone. The meeting strongly condemned the delaying tactics of power utilities in fulfilling their long pending demands.

The engineers were agitated over delaying tactics of managements of power utilities and warned that power utilities and government were forcing engineers to adopt a path of confrontation which they had been avoiding so for. The engineers have decided to give 45 days time to utilities to solve their problems.

R S Dahiya, President of Haryana Power Engineers Federation, said that despite repeated appeals to the power utilities’ managements and state government the pay scale of assistant engineers working in Discoms has not been brought at par with the state government engineers. While one power utility HPGCL has granted Rs 14880/- as basic pay to Assistant Engineers, the other three utilities have denied the same scale to their engineers. Haryana government recruited Assistant Engineers for the power utilities but they are being paid scales of junior engineers.

Putting up a strong case for the assistant engineers, Dahiya said the Assistant engineers of the state government were better placed, and getting an initial salary of Rs 14,880 with grade pay of Rs 5,400. The same pay scales must be given to all the power engineers of power utilities. Earlier, the pay scales of power engineers used to be better than state government engineers.

Regarding restructuring of Discoms the issue has been hanging fire for more than a decade. The management is now playing the policy of divide and rule and delaying tactics.

Power utilities are being run at the whims of finance people. The finance wing has now made deduction from their pay for the increments given at the time of promotion, change of grade pay and at the time of grant of time scales contrary to the circulars of Haryana Government, said HVPN engineers.

The council further urged that the vacant posts of Directors should be filled immediately and all the Directors be given term up to date of their retirement. Already, there is one vacant post of Director in HVPN, one post in HPGCL will be vacant later this month and three more Directors are going to retire in September. The selection process for filling posts should be started three months before their retirements.

The post of Chairman of Power Utilities is lying vacant for more than one year and should be filled immediately. The additional charge has been given to Financial Commissioner Power. Financial commissioner has been discharging dual role of deciding authority and appellant authority in case of engineers.