BSNL employees body to stage 5-day agitation

Kolkata, Jun 23: Sansad Nigam Executive Association will launch a contrywide peaceful agitation between June 25-29 to pressurise the authority into purchasing equipments for providing 45.5 million GSM lines to be provided within 2010.

Sansad Nigam Executive Association (SNEA), which has 35,000 executives as memebers of the total 50,000 executives in the country within the BSNL top authorities. The agitators alleged that these authorities would turn the company into a sick unit in the near future.

SNEA leader Rupam Sen, Tapas Bose and Dilip Saha in a joint press conference today reiterated that during the five-day agitation from June 25, regular service would not be disturbed.

They said that their agiation was to bring to the notice of the stakeholders the ''deliberate negligence in making this publuc sector unit a sick one''.

They said that there was a huge market for BSNL, but due to exhastion of equipments in the BSNL units across the country the company was gradually falling behind the private mobile service providers.

BSNL had plenty of opportunity to meet he growing demand in substantial numbers, perhaps could have even outpaced Airtel or Hutch, if the existong capacity had not been exhausted.

They alleged that the government was unnecessarily delaying the placement of purchase order of equipments neded for BSNL, which would have been completed last April after a interim order of a global centre for buying equipments.

There are three lakh BSNL employees across the country, but their existence is at stake because of the alleged negligence of the higher authorities.

UNI