Comments
The Terms of Reference (ToR) set on Tuesday by the Defence Ministry, for a high-level committee to address the concerns raised by workers’ federations, have raised further apprehensions about the Centre’s policy towards corporatisation of Ordnance Factories Board (OFB).
Federations have questioned the ToR and said they will challenge it at a meeting with the high-level panel scheduled on September 30. The federations, which held a six-day strike recently against the proposal, maintained that OFB should remain a Defence Ministry Department and should not be converted as a public sector enterprise. The ToR, approved by Defence Minister Rajnath Singh, said the high level panel will work out safeguards to protect the interests of employees in terms of wages, health facilities and other service matters due to converting OFB into a public sector entity.
The panel will also assess the requirement of budgetary support for OFB employees’ salaries. The panel will also assess the concerns regarding “future orders” for the proposed new entity in view of the difficulties being faced in the present set up.
Increasing turnover
It will also work out the road-map for increasing the turnover of the proposed entity to ₹30,000 crore. The panel can also assess the viability of some of the factories as public sector entities. The Federations said they will not accept any proposal for converting the ordnance factories into a PSU/Corporation.
“We are studying the terms of reference. The Centre finalised the ToR without any consultation with us. We will discuss among ourselves and place our position before the high level committee. We have already forwarded our views to the Prime Minister and all Cabinet Ministers,” said the All India Defence Employees Federation general secretary C Srikumar.
The BMS-affiliated Bharatiya Pratiraksha Mazdoor Sangh (BPMS) general secretary, Mukesh Singh, said the main customer of OFB is the Indian Army and the budget of the Army is allotted by the Finance Ministry.
“Eighty-three per cent of total budget allotted to the Army is related to Revenue Expenditures and only 17 per cent is for Capital Expenditures. Further, under the modernisation process, government is signing new contracts but due to a resource crunch, it is difficult to pay past contracts. In such circumstances, ordnance factories will not be given proper workload to utilise its cent percent capacity,” Singh told BusinessLine .
He said OFB has to maintain its capacity to provide life long (40 - 50 yrs) service support to its products.
“Ordnance factories suffer from work load fluctuations — sometimes very high volume/quantity is demanded for a particular item whereby we have to enhance our capacity, sometimes no requirement and sometimes very low volume/quantity is demanded.
“But we cannot change our installed capacity each and every time. This creates financial crunch to ordnance factories and having such problems any corporation cannot survive.
“This will ultimately affect the wages, allowances and other privileges of the employees. Hence, we are opposing the corporatisation of ordnance factories,” the BPMS general secretary added.
Comments
COMMENT NOW
Comments
Comments have to be in English, and in full sentences. They cannot be abusive or personal. Please abide by our community guidelines for posting your comments.
We have migrated to a new commenting platform. If you are already a registered user of TheHindu Businessline and logged in, you may continue to engage with our articles. If you do not have an account please register and login to post comments. Users can access their older comments by logging into their accounts on Vuukle.