The Uttaranchal Roadways Karmchari Union (URKU) took back its strike call after meeting with State Transport Minister on Friday afternoon. The strike call partially affected the operation of buses of Uttarakhand roadways on the day.
On the issue of regularization of contractual drivers and conductors the URKU had given a three day work boycott from Friday. As part of the state government’s initiative to break the strike, a delegation of the association was invited for talks by the Transport minister Navprabhat at his Vidhan Sabha office on Friday. The meeting was attended by Transport secretary C S Napalchayal, General Manager Operations, Deepak Jain and the representatives of the URKU. In the meeting an understanding between the government and URKU was reached after which the work boycott call was taken back.
The GM Operation of Roadways Deepak Jain told The Pioneer that understanding on three points was reached during the meeting. I was agreed upon that the proposal to regularize the services of 3000 outsource workers would be brought before the cabinet sub committee. The ongoing recruitment drive on 300 posts of drivers was stopped and government assured the URKU that the no outsource agency would be hired for recruitment of personnel in roadways.
Expressing satisfaction on the outcome of meeting, the divisional secretary of the URKU, K P Singh said that work boycott call was taken back at 2 pm after which the operation of buses was normalized. He claimed that the strike was successful as 70 percent of the buses of state transport were off the roads in the morning. The GM Operations Deepak Jain however claimed that only 20-25 percent services were affected on the day.
The strike of URKU affected the services of roadways in intrastate routes. The services on inter state and some of the important intrastate routes remained more or less unaffected by the strike call. People faced problems while commuting from Dehradun to Haridwar, Rishikesh and Mussoorie routes. The services were restored in afternoon.