Workers of the Airport Authority of India are on the war path against the move of the government to privatise the Chennai and Kolkata Airports. This follows the decision of the Civil Aviation Ministry to hand over the running of Chennai and Kolkata Airports to private parties.
Workers of the Airport Authority of India are on the war path against the move of the government to privatise the Chennai and Kolkata Airports. This follows the decision of the Civil Aviation Ministry to hand over the running of Chennai and Kolkata Airports to private parties. Over a thousand workers of the AAI in Chennai declared on June 21, 2013 they will strike work and carry out other forms of protest. It is expected that they will be joined in this struggle by AAI workers in Kolkata and other airports.
In the middle of June, the government formed a “infrastructure development cell” to speed up the introduction of the public-private partnership mode and engage a private operator to manage a number of AAI-run airports in the country, including Chennai and Kolkata.
A leader of the Airport Authorities of India Employees Unions said “It is atrocious to privatise Chennai airport after Airports Authority of India (AAI) has invested over Rs. 2, 000 crore. Not just Chennai, even Kolkata and many other non-metros have been modernised by AAI but the government wants to privatise all of these.” Members of the International Airports Authority Officers’ Association (IAAOA) have also extended their support to this struggle of AAIEU.
It may be recalled that in the first phase of privatisation of airports, Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Kochi airports were handed over to private operators. Along with the running of the airports, the government handed over the extremely valuable land and other assets to the private parties. Thus a huge source of revenue was foregone. Furthermore, despite all the assurances to workers that they would retain their jobs even after privatization, the opposite happened. Within a period of three years after privatisation, all the workers were forced to take VRS.
At that time, because of powerful opposition from workers in Chennai and Kolkata, these two airports were not privatized. The Airports Authority of India carried out the modernization work of these two airports. Now that this has been done, the government wants to hand over the operations of the airport to private parties.