In protest, power engineers remove SIM cards from official phones

Members of the PSEB Engineers’ Association comprising all officers of PSPCL/PSTCL from the rank of Assistant Engineer to Engineer-in-Chief have removed SIM cards from their official mobile phones under protest.

The power engineers have been on protest for the last many months against the management due to the non-resolution of their long pending genuine demands.

PSEB Engineers’ Association had already given advance notice for the agitation programme and on earlier occasions the agitation programme had been postponed on the assurances of the management.

Recently, on the appeal of Chief Minister Amarinder Singh and keeping in view the power crisis in the state, the agitation was postponed for more than 30 days.

“Even after repeated positive assurances regarding the start scale of Rs 18,030 to new engineers, no concrete action has been taken by the management to date. Moreover, management has gone against an established policy by excluding the representatives of employee associations/unions from the Wage Formulation Committee, even though the power corporation is not dependent on Punjab government for its pay but management has included two number representatives from outside power corporations in the Wage Formulation Committee,” a statement issued by the association said.

Cautioning the management that removing the SIMs will hamper some financial transactions and other statutory time-bound compliances, Association has written to PSPCL and PSTCL managements to make alternate offline arrangements for the same.

Jasvir Singh Dhiman, president of the association, said that the association has always kept the issues of the power sector above its own demands.

“The Engineers of PSPCL/ PSTCL toil hard day and night to ensure uninterrupted power supply to the public of Punjab but management has consistently adopted a strategy of ignoring the genuine issues and is deliberately forcing the engineers to a path of agitation,” he said.

Dhiman cautioned the management that if the genuine issues of engineers are not resolved in a time-bound manner the engineers will be compelled to intensify the agitation further for which only management will be responsible.