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BEST strike hits Mumbai commuters for 7th day
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SME Times News Bureau | 15 Jan, 2019
Over four million commuters including students were badly hit as the
strike by over 20,000 employees of the Bombay Electric Supply and
Transport (BEST), the lifeline of the city, entered the seventh day here
on Monday.
Amidst moves to "privatise" BEST - which supplies
electricity to south Mumbai and also runs the public bus services
catering to commuters in Mumbai, Mumbai suburbs, Thane and Raigad - the
ruling Shiv Sena and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), worried over its
political repercussions, have been struggling to bring the buses back on
the roads.
While the opposition Congress and the Nationalist
Congress Party have squarely blamed the Sena-BJP for the developments,
the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena has threatened to hold demonstrations all
over Mumbai on Monday if the strike issue is not resolved.
The
main BEST Workers Union President Shashank Rao has said that they will
take a final decision on the issue after a hearing in the Bombay High
Court later on Monday.
The state government will submit a report
on the matter after hearing both the BEST administration and the
employees' BEST Sanyukt Kamgar Kriti Samiti (BSKKS).
The
indefinite strike since January 8 is for the main demands of the
employees including merger of the annual budgets of the cash-rich
BrihanMumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) with the loss-making BEST, wage
agreements including provisions for implementing the 7th Pay Commission
recommendations and making salary slabs of 14,000 junior staffers who
have been underpaid since 2011 at par with regular employees in the same
payscale.
In the meantime, the government has attempted to ease
the commuters' misery by deploying extra Maharashtra State Transport
Corp. Ltd. buses and school buses besides the Western Railway and
Central Railway chipping in with extra train services.
Founded in
1873 as a tram service, the BEST is reportedly sitting on a massive
loss of around Rs 2,500 crore in the past few years after it was hit by
developments like the Mumbai Metro, Monorail, augmentation of cabs,
rising fuel costs and other factors.
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