March 21: Telephone lines in several areas of Calcutta remained jammed for the seventh consecutive day and telecom services collapsed in the Northeast as 50,000 executives of Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) continued their countrywide agitation.

The executives are demanding implementation of a promotion policy promised when they were absorbed from the department of telecommunications to BSNL in October 2000.

The executives want the public sector telecom company to follow a judgment delivered by the principle bench of the Central Administrative Tribunal on August 29, 2003, stating that ?executives will be allowed upgradation to the next higher pay scale on a time-bound basis, varying between four and six years.?

Chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya intervened today and asked the executives to convey their charter of demands to the principal secretary.

On the second day of the agitation, the executives had stopped cash collection at some of the BSNL centres as well as maintenance and new installations.

The industrial sector is upset over the disruption of services and has urged the BSNL management to negotiate and end the agitation.

Cellphone, STD and Internet connectivity collapsed in the northeastern states because of the agitation. While Assam and Meghalaya use Reliance Mobile as well as BSNL?s CellOne for mobile telephony, the other five states use CellOne.

Reliance Mobile users in Assam and Meghalaya were left in the lurch as the agitating employees allegedly ?sabotaged? the point of connectivity? which BSNL has leased out to the private mobile operator.

It has lodged a complaint with the telecom department, a Reliance official said.

In Calcutta, Tapas Ghosh, a member of the United Forum for BSNL Executives, said they had ensured that essential services like hospitals, fire brigade and others ran smoothly in Bengal, where 4,000 BSNL executives are participating in the indefinite work-to-rule agitation.

The BSNL management had asked the executives to give a written undertaking that they will not be part of the agitation, failing which their service could be terminated with a month?s salary.

The newly recruited junior technical officers and junior accounts officers were also asked to give a similar undertaking or face termination. Representatives of the forum in Calcutta refused to give the undertaking.

BSNL has also set up a monitoring cell that will supervise the performance of exchanges in Calcutta and report daily to the control room.