Pandhe

New Delhi, Jan. 19: Bandhs may have been the flavour of the season in Bengal, but industrial strikes are receding.

Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee will be happy to know that his state is no longer the largest single contributor to the nation’s strikes calendar.

The Labour Bureau, Shimla, says the number of man-days Bengal lost last year because of strikes is just 12,000 while Kerala, the other Left bastion, topped the list with 174,616.

Even Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan lost over 10 times the man-days that Bengal did, recording figures of 137,374 and 126,256.

Just the previous year, the Labour Bureau had counted the highest number of strikes and lockouts in Bengal, followed by Tamil Nadu and Gujarat.

What’s meat for Bhattacharjee is poison for his comrade and Citu president M.K. Pandhe, who has never taken kindly to the Bengal chief minister’s calls for a go-slow on general strikes, especially in IT.

Pandhe dismissed the bureau’s figures, saying they did not “reflect the correct picture”.

“The government data are not reliable: they ignore political strikes. This is evident from the use of terms like ‘loss of man-days’. They only take into account those strikes for which the unions give prior notice,” the CPM labour arm’s chief said.

Citu organised several all-India strikes during the past one year in protest against the Centre’s economic policies. Its hardliners want to open unions even in the IT sector — and have started an “association” in Bengal’s Salt Lake — although Bhattacharjee recommends a “hands off” policy for the industry.

Bengal Citu leaders argue that no exception can be made to the policies followed by the CPM and Citu in the rest of the country. Kerala is a model for this line of thinking.

But not everybody in the CPM shares Pandhe’s enthusiasm for strikes.

There are murmurs within the party over Citu’s stranglehold over Kerala and the state’s economic sloth.

Unlike Bengal, where the state committee backs Bhattacharjee’s economic reforms, the Kerala state committee is steeped in factional politics with the pro and anti-reforms groups sticking knives into each other.

Analysts argue that the decline in strikes in Bengal is a fallout of the serial closure of factories and the sluggish industrial climate. Another reason, they say, is the expansion of sectors like IT that are not trade union-friendly. Citu, despite its efforts at wooing IT employees, has not met with much success.

Labour Bureau statistics show that only 2,210 man-days were lost across the country in the service sector, while the figure is 488,639 for the manufacturing sector, the biggest loser.