Raising a unified voice against the Centre’s “anti-worker” policies, members of various trade unions staged sit-in demonstrations at multiple locations in the State’s coal belt region as the 48-hour nationwide strike called by the joint forum of central trade unions began this morning.
Members of the Singareni Collieries Workers’ Union (SCWU), affiliated to the AITUC, staged a demonstration in front of the RK-7 underground coal mine in Srirampur area of Mancherial district this morning.
Slogans denouncing the Centre’s attempts to auction the four coal blocks in Telangana for commercial mining rent the air. The SCWU general secretary V Seetharamaiah led the demonstration.
The local leaders of the SCWU claimed that the coal miners owing allegiance to the major central trade unions stayed away from work in the RK-7 and various other coal mines of the State-owned Singareni Collieries Company Limited (SCCL) in the erstwhile composite Adilabad district and elsewhere in the coal belt region.
However, SCCL sources insisted that the production is expected to be near normal during the first shift on Monday.
The company has put in place a contingency plan to ensure uninterrupted coal production in the last four days of the current fiscal to reach the set annual coal output target of 68 million tonnes.
In Khammam, a host of leaders of the Congress, CPI (M), CPI and CPI (ML) Praja Pandha, besides several trade unions and mass organisations squatted in front of the TSRTC bus depot in protest against the Centre’s “anti-worker” and “pro-privatisation” policies.
They raised slogans demanding scrapping of the four labour codes, the Essential Defence Services Act and the National Monetisation Pipeline (NMP) scheme.
Initial reports said the TSRTC buses plied as usual in the old undivided Karimnagar district, where the strike evoked mixed response till noon.
