THE Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU) has strongly opposed the government’s decision to go for auctioning of 69 identified, discovered oil and gas fields -- both off-shore and on-shore ¬-- terming them as “marginal fields”. The move is against the interest of the national economy, particularly the public sector oil companies, and of course harmful to the employees in general. It will jeopardize the energy security of the country. “The move of the government, to handover discovered oil & gas fields, is nothing but dolling out national assets to private businesses, both domestic and foreign. Hundreds of crores of rupee spent by the oil PSUs only for discovering these fields are gone unaccounted with no return on these investments. The shocking terms of the contract are the licence for exploitation of the fields for 20 years, on revenue sharing basis, open market pricing and open ended marketing rights to the contractors. Further the contractors under the new model shall be exempted from paying cess on crude oil to the government resulting in crores of rupees cash transfer to the contractors,” the Secretariat of CITU said in a statement in New Delhi on September 4. It must be noted that at the beginning of the opening up of the sector the model adopted was ‘production sharing’ and later switched over to ‘profit sharing’ and now it is ‘revenue sharing’. The new model will be exploited by private operators to earn ‘high windfall profits’. This new model heavily loaded in favour of private sector. It will certainly not remain confined to so-called marginal fields but shall be extended to major fields as well. The new move will put the public sector crude oil refineries into great trouble and have serious adverse impact on prices of petroleum products and have cascading impacts on the general price level. CITU has urged upon all its affiliates and fraternity to oppose the move by mobilising workers of the sector in particular and the people in general through campaign, propaganda and protest actions. (END)