One week ago, on October 5, unions and employees of the Telangana State Road Transport Corporation went on an indefinite strike. The protesters are asking for merging TSRTC with the state government, opposing the proposed privatization of the RTC, among other demands.
In response to the call to protest, the state government had said that employees who do not join their duties by 6 pm on Saturday will be terminated. Over 48,000 people work in the Telangana RTC.
Since the strike did continue, it was reported that these number of employees have been dismissed from their services. The strike is still going on as of today, and there is no clear understanding of whether the posts are truly vacant or not.
While the demands of current (ex) employees are on one side, lakhs of job aspirants have a different question in mind – Will TSRTC release job notification now?
For this reason, since the past weekend, TSRTC notification 2019 has been searched a lot. There are different stories over social media, and news reports on this matter. The consistent facts in reports are that the state government has asked officials to go ahead with issuing notifications for recruitment to driver and bus conductor posts.
It is also being said that now 50% of the bus fleets will be owned and managed by the road transport corporation, 30% will be buses that will be hired, and 20% will be private buses. Joint Action Committee (JAC) of the TSRTC unions are in continuous talks to stop this from happening.
Even though the strikes and back and forth between the union and government started one week ago, there was a brief pause in the issue in view of the festive celebrations (Dussehra was on October 8). Nevertheless the huge gap created in the availability of public transport has affected the normal public. Resulting in the government stating that the future employees will have to sign on papers that will not unionize.
Another report claims that TSRTC officials are operating half the existing fleet of buses with temporary employees.
One Man’s Loss Is Another Man’s Gain?
TSRTC was formed in the year 2014 by splitting of the Andhra Pradesh State Road Transport Corporation. It is a state owned corporation. Considering that the proposed privatization is not 100% privatization (it is proposed to be trifurcated), several government job aspirants in the state are looking forward for the recruitment notification. However it is worthy to note that those who held the job earlier, will be left without a job in hand.
Whether such a notification will come or not, will be clear in a few days, when the air clears over the matter of the strike, and action that government takes on the striking workers.
At this moment, any official notification is not available on the official website of the corporation tsrtc.telangana.gov.in or in any employment news or rozgar samachar.
