From Our Special Correspondent
GUWAHATI: Members of the Hindustan Paper Corporation (HPC) Mills Revival Action Committee, comprising employees of two non-functional paper mills in Assam, have appealed to the people “not to vote for BJP” in the upcoming Lok Sabha elections.
It may be recalled that production in Cachar Paper Mill at Panchgram has been suspended since October 20, 2015 while operations at Nagaon Paper Mill at Jagiroad came to a halt on March 13, 2017.
Speaking to reporters here on Wednesday, Manobendra Chakraborty, chief convener of committee, informed that a campaign has been initiated with an appeal to voters to be conscious and refrain from voting for a party which had promised much before the 2014 parliamentary elections but has not done anything for their welfare.
“The government has created an atmosphere to stop production in Cachar and Nagaon paper mills and to hand the mills over to private parties. An artificial scarcity of paper has been created with paper being procured from China, Korea and Bangladesh to mitigate the shortage,” Chakraborty alleged.
Till date, 51 employees of the mills have died owing to illness, starvation and lack of medical care in the wake of non-payment of salaries for the past 27 months and failure to revive the mills owned by the government. Two among them have allegedly committed suicide.
“The market price of paper has shot up from Rs 48,000 per metric tonne when the mills were operating to about Rs 1.07 lakh per metric tonne now. This has been done to facilitate the private companies to carry out monopoly business even as about 2 lakh employees of the mills have pushed to the brink of starvation and death,” he said.
The committee further alleged that the government had failed to set up any industry in Assam in the past five years.
“Worse still, it has adhered to favouritism by sanctioning funds for mills in Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat while ignoring umpteen pleas made by the employees of the mills in Assam. We have met the chief minister as many as 14 times since closure of the mills but to no avail,” Chakraborty rued.
The committee further said that even the Provident Fund money has not been deposited in the employees’ accounts since 2015.
“What is disconcerting is that state industry minister while answering to questions in the last Assembly session said only 29 employees of the two mills died owing to unfortunate circumstances. Besides, he had no answer when asked about the revival of the mills or measures taken to meet the education expenses of the employees’ children,” he added.