People's Democracy

CITU Extends Support to Airport Employees  

Struggle against Privatisation of Airports

The Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU) secretariat has issued the following statement on October 24:

THE Centre of Indian Trade Unions extends total support to the ongoing united struggle by the employees of Airport Authority of India against the retrograde move of the government to hand over 20 major airports of the country to private players on a revenue sharing basis.

The Joint Forum of Unions and Associations of AAI comprising all the unions of AAI employees have been conducting the struggle. They have successfully resisted the inspection of airports by the team of private players at Chennai and Lucknow and have now been staging relay hunger strike in all the AAI-run airports of the country where employees irrespective of affiliations have joined enmasse. Their struggle has also drawn support from all the trade unions in the country who have also expressed their solidarity to the anti-privatisation struggle by AAI employees. In the days to come their united agitation to resist the privatisation is going to be heightened further.

The Government of India has planned to privatise 20 major revenue earning airports of the country through the so-called PPP route viz. the airports at Chennai, Kolkata, Lucknow, Guwahati, Jaipur, Ahmedabad, Bhubaneswar, Coimbatore, Trichy, Varanasi, Indore, Amritsar, Udaipur, Gaya, Raipur, Bhopal, Agartala, Imphal, Mangalore and Vadodara on  a revenue sharing basis. Most of these airports have already been modernised and expanded with huge investment from the State owned AAI’s exchequer, to the tune of  Rs 20,000 crore plus and now these readymade renovated airports are being sought to be handed over to private control, free of cost on a revenue sharing basis. Can there be anything more scandalous than this ?

The CITU condemns such retrograde move of handing over huge public property to private hands free of cost to facilitate windfall gain by private operators without making any investment whatsoever and likes to remind that theses public properties belong to the nation and not the council of ministers of the UPA government.

The CITU calls upon the working people of the country and the trade union movement in particular to unitedly oppose such disastrous move of privatisation of airports and extend all support and solidarity to the united struggle of the AAI employees in defence of country’s airport infrastructure.