On the call of All India Graduate Engineers and Telecom Officers Association, all qualified engineers and account officers of BSNL would be on mass leave from July 22 and will held mass demonstration on July 29 against discriminatory attitude of BSNL management and deliberate and planned move of BSNL management to declare it a sick PSU.

Arun Kukkar, Circle Secretary, AIGETOA, Punjab said here today that after inception of BSNL in Oct-2000, BSNL has made till date, direct recruitment of around 12000 professionally qualified Graduate engineers and Account Officers at executive level to run the telecom services of BSNL and more than three lakh employees have been absorbed from Department of Telecom. When the Telecom Scenario was changing at very fast pace and most of the existing set of employees absorbed from DoT era were unable to cope-up with these fast changes in Telecom Technologies owing to their working in legacy era and age and lack of professional qualifications, these 12000 young and professionally qualified executives have taken maximum of the responsibilities on their shoulders to run the technology oriented telecom services at executive level.

He said that instead of keeping the motivation level high, BSNL management has deliberately started targeting this group so that private operators can have a free run.

Arun Kukkar said that BSNL management has hiked the salary of all the absorbed employees by 30 to 40% followed by the pay revision effected from January 1, 2007 but at the same time salary of the qualified executives recruited after January 1, 2007 has been lowered by almost 20% then their pre-revised salary. Then, the BSNL management is contributing towards pensionary benefits of the absorbed employees on the maximum of the pay scale as recommended by pay revision. Even BSNL management is paying perks and allowance to the executives working on deputation but contributing no amount for the pensionary benefits of the direct recruits against the recommendation of pay revision hence survival of these young executives in their retired life is on stake. He added that recently BSNL management had extended the benefits of 78.2% IDA merger to all it?s executives and non-executives which imposed around 400 crore per year fmancial burden on BSNL and extended perks and allowance to the officers working on deputation but denied to implement the recommendations to hike the pay of directs recruits who are already facing pay loss after pay revision and to extend the pension benefits citing poor financial position of BSNL.

He said that BSNL management has allowed the promotion to absorbed employees to the level of DGM irrespective of their qualification but despite having all the talent and professional

qualification executives recruited after inception of BSNL could not get their first promotion even after passing more than l0 years.