JAMMU: Power employees have made the decision to take a 48-hour protest leave starting on September 25 in response to what they perceive to be the Government’s lack of commitment towards their demands. This was stated to the media on Tuesday by Sachin Tickoo, head of the Jammu and Kashmir Electrical Engineering Graduates Association of the Power Development Department. He bemoaned the lack of noticeable progress on any of the issues mentioned in the protest leave notice delivered on August 24, 2023, and following the holding of a 24-hour mass protest casual leave on September 9 with participation from Junior Engineers to Chief Engineers and support from several associations of PDD in solidarity with JKEEGA.“The Government has not kept its promises. The problem has developed over the past two months as salaries have also not been paid on schedule, leaving all 21,000 PDD employees without their August salaries, which only serves to fuel employee anger. Tickoo claimed that the PDD engineers were given step-motherly treatment by the appropriate authorities because there were over 750 open positions in the engineering hierarchy, including one Managing Director position, three Executive Director positions, six Chief Engineer positions, sixteen Superintending Engineer positions, 61 Executive Engineer positions, 132 Assistant Ex Engineer positions, 164 Assistant Engineer positions, and approximately 350 Junior Engineer positions.Other PDD employee leaders present at the press conference included Gurmeet Singh of the JKNGEEA, Tarun Gupta of the Provincial Power Employees Union, Ashiq Hussain of the Lineman and Workers Union, H D Singh of the Technical Employees Federation, Akhil Kumar of the PDL/TDL and other workers’ Union. They gave unwavering support to the JKEEGA’s call for a 48-hour period of total protest and a 48-hour period of no labour. In addition to Ankush Sharma, Rohit Gupta, Ankush Gupta, Vijay Sharma, Purshottam Lal Sharma, and Vipul Sharma, other JKEEGA Executive Council members Ashok Dubey, Rajeshwar Jamwal, Sunil Gupta, Jahangir Ahmed, Gulshan Bhagat, Yash Paul, Vishal Singh Chib, and Ankush Gupta were present at the press conference.JKEEGA has requested that the Lieutenant Governor of J&K step in and instruct the appropriate authority to approve the requests for the promotion and regularisation of the qualified officers by September 25.
