Trading defence products may affect national security: INDWF

Barrackpore, Jun 17 (UNI) Indian National Defence Workers' Federation general secretary R.Srinivasan has accused the Centre of jeopardising national security by allowing private industrialists to trade defence products.

Addressing the 42nd Annual General Meeting of the Ordinance Factroies' National Majdoor Union near here at Rifle Factory Ishapore today, Mr Srinivasan observed that for granting Raksha Udyog Ratna status to private industries, the Centre has been trying to justify its policy of privatisation of defence production and related activities like Research and Development which could jeopardise secrecy of country's defence productions.

''The industries, if provided with licenses, having no infrastructure of defence production would only inflate the country's import volume against a huge foreign exchange,'' Mr Srinivasan alleged.

He claimed that a section of top bureaucrats at the Centre were involved in the process, targeting to occupy suitable positions in such private organizations to deal defence productions in the future.

Echoing Mr Srinivasan's concern, president of the West Bengal unit fof the Indian National Trade Union Congress (INTUC) Subrata Mukherjee said that the Centre should enact suitable laws to prevent the top brass from joining any such private organizations, so that defence secrets which these officials knew were not leaked.

A similar law should also be enacted in the states, he demanded, and called upon the industrial workers irrespective of political ideologies to unite at the trade union level to fight to protect the workers' interests.

Mr Mukherjee described the UPA government's recent pronouncement of the provision of provident fund benefits for the workers of unorganized sector as farce, since the ''government had proper laws to take action against the defaulters of provident funds, particularly those were taking away crores of rupees, accumulated from the workers contribution to the fund''.

In this connection, he claimed that in the jute sector, not less than 2.5 lakh workers were deprived of their provident fund benefits as the mill owners did not pay Rs 400 crore to the PF authorities.

UNI