Engineers strike for Plant

YOGINDRA MOHAN

Patiala

The engineers working in the Punjab State Power Corporation Limited (PSPCL) and the Punjab State Transmission Corporation Limited (PSTCL) throughout the state on Tuesday observed two-hour ‘pen-down tool down’ strike to protest against the delay by the government in approving the PSPCL’s proposal to set up 1320 megawatt thermal plant.

The engineers were also protesting against the Punjab Generation Policy which scrapped competitive bidding for setting up thermal plants by adopting the long discarded concept of memorandum of understanding (MoU) route. During this period, all engineers switched off their mobile phones.

H S Bedi, president and Bhupinder Singh, general secretary, of PSEB Engineers Association also released a white paper on the Generation Policy of the state government which pointed out that all the states were setting up plants under state sector along with private and central sector plants to maintain adequate state share in generation. On the contrary, Punjab has not planned even a single mega watt in the state sector.

They said that as a consequence of this, there will be complete dominance of the private sector as the share of own generation will come down from 52 per cent to below 19 per cent which would be totally inadequate to manage wide fluctuations in demand in an economical and efficient manner. Since all the investment is coming from private sector, the youths of Punjab will be deprived of employment opportunities that were expected from such an investment. They also criticised the Generation Policy announced by the government in June 2010 by bypassing the practice of inviting global bids for setting up thermal plants.