CITU opposes Major Ports Authority Bill

The Major Ports Authority Bill, 2016, the draft of which was approved by the Union Cabinet earlier this week, will weaken the major ports of the country and pave the way for the capture of the precious resources of these ports like huge chunks of land by corporates, according to Tapan Sen, the member of the Rajya Sabha and the general secretary of the CITU.

He was speaking at the inaugural of the two-day ninth national conference of the Water Transport Workers' Federation of India here on Friday. He said the bill was intended to replace the Major Ports Trust Act, 1963, in order to weaken the PSU ports and strengthen the private ports. He said "such attempts of the NDA Government should be fought to protect the interests of the nation, the economy and the workers in particular." He also criticised the attempts of some states like Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh to develop a string of private ports along the coast to weaken the PSU ports.

He said demonetisation was a very harmful and ill-advised exercise eating into the vitals of the economy and hitting the most vulnerable sections of the society the hardest. He said it was also intended to bail out the crisis-ridden banking sector in the country by forcing people to deposit their monies in the banks and to switch over to cashless transactions. "In the first place, the banking sector has been pushed into the crisis due to the huge NPAs. Those NPAs are being written off and the common man is subjected to untold hardship," he said.

Ch. Narasinga Rao, the state general secretary of the CITU, said the union had always been fighting hard to protect the PSU units in the city like the Visakhapatnam steel plant, the Vizag port, the Hindustan Shipyard Ltd, and the BHPV.

sarma.rs@thehindu.co.in

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