Rajendra Prasad Singh (left) addresses the convention in Ranchi on Tuesday. Picture by Hardeep Singh

Ranchi, June 28: Leading trade unions, representing coal workers, have decided to serve a strike notice next month if the Union ministry did not accept their demands.

The unions will take a formal decision to this effect at a meeting in Delhi on July 4.

They strongly felt a strike was imminent and blamed the coal ministry and Coal India Limited (CIL) management of indifference.

At the National Coal Workers Convention, involving Intuc, Aituc, Citu, Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (BMS) and Hind Mazdoor Sangh (HMS), in Ranchi today, the participants rued that although the eighth wage bipartite is expiring on Thursday, the government had not taken any step to enforce a ninth bipartite with increased pay from July 1.

The workers demanded the Centre to put a stop to disinvestment, cancel coal blocks awarded for captive mining, raise pension from 25 to 40 per cent, scrap existing rehabilitation and resettlement policies in consultation with trade unions and grant the status of infrastructure industry to coal businesses.

“Over 200 coal blocks have been awarded to private players. We firmly demand that workers in captive mines be paid on a par with their counterparts in CIL mines. The latter is unable to address the problems of its workers at home, but on the other hand has taken up operations in foreign countries. An hour’s wage of a coal worker in Australia far exceeds what a worker in India earns in a month,” said Nathu Lal Pandey, the president of HMS-affiliated Hind Khadan Mazdoor Federation.

Intuc general secretary Rajendra Prasad Singh alleged that the CCL management had passed on wrong information to the judiciary and CBI about unauthorised occupancy in its residential quarters and land.

Singh, also the leader of the Opposition in the state Assembly, is charged with illegally occupying a CCL quarter for several decades. “I began my career as a dispatch supervisor in CCL in 1971 and became an MLA in 1985. The quarter was allotted to me in 1972. It was a valueless settlement owned by a colonial ruler of Ramgarh princely estate. A joint consultative committee had agreed to provide accommodation to its former employees and trade unions and fixed rents. We will prove our point with concrete documentary evidence,” he said.