OPPOSING the proposed privatisation of six airports in the country, Tapan Sen, general secretary of CITU wrote a letter to the union minister for civil aviation, on February 11.

It is shocking to note that the government of India has decided to privatise six more airports of the country that are functioning under the Airports Authority of India through the so-called PPP route.  The airports proposed to be privatised at the moment are Trivandrum, Guwahati, Jaipur, Ahmedabad, Lucknow and Mangalore as per the reports received.

The CITU vehemently opposes such a move of privatisation of these six airports. All these six airports have been modernised through huge investments from public exchequer under the supervision of Airports Authority of India. The quality of modernisation of these six airports is in no way inferior, if not superior, to that of the airports of Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad and Bangalore built under private sector operators, which decisively proves the competence and capability of the public sector AAI.

Such retrograde and unfair decision to privatise has created serious resentment among the employees of the AAI which is reflected in the overwhelming majority of its employees endorsing through strike ballot, the resolve of the Airports Authority Employees Union to go for industrial strike against the privatisation move.

The employees union has accordingly decided to go in for strike in the AAI from February 20, 2019 and the country’s trade union movement has extended full support to their struggle against privatisation.

In view of this, Tapan Sen has requested the civil aviation minister to appreciate the gravity of the issue and in particular the impropriety and blatant unfairness of the government’s move for privatisation of these six airports and appropriately intervene so that the government refrains from this move in the interests of fairness and propriety and to avoid industrial unrest.