The Hindu : Business : Coal mine workers to get wage arrears

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Feb 24, 2006

Business

Business

Coal mine workers to get wage arrears

Indrani Dutta

Entire backlog to be cleared by March 2007

KOLKATA: Nearly six lakh coal mine workers will get Rs. 2,000 crore additional payment by March this year as part of the arrear payment on account of the seventh round of the National Coal Wage Agreement (NCWA) signed on July 15, 2005.

A schedule of clearing by March 2007 the entire backlog of arrear payments totalling around Rs. 4,000 crore was arrived at recently, after discussions between top officials of Coal India Ltd. (CIL), its subsidiaries and representatives of five central trade unions at the CIL headquarters here,union sources said.

While the total impact of the latest NCWA is about Rs. 7,000 crore, the outstanding arrear is Rs. 4,000 crore since some interim relief was being paid to the workers since January 2004. The NCWA-VII is effective July 2001.

While the five profit-making subsidiaries of CIL can meet the payment obligations out of their own cash reserves, Eastern Coalfields Ltd. (ECL), which faces a Rs. 873 crore outgo, would need special permission from the Board for Reconstruction of Public Sector Enterprises (BRPSE) and the Committee of Secretaries since its approved revival plan had a three-year provision for this. ECL, which has about 1.03 lakh employees on its rolls, is the largest employer in CIL fold.

Bharat Coking Coal Ltd (BCCL), which has about 89,000 employees and has just begun turning around, has sought soft loans from its holding company, CIL, to enable it to take the Rs. 913 crore hit.

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