New Delhi, Jun 13 (PTI): The Delhi High Court on Wednesday asked the Centre and the Air India management to respond to a plea of striking pilots that their salaries and other pecuniary benefits have not been paid.
”Issue notice to the respondents (the Centre and the Air India). A reply be filed within a week,” Justice S P Garg said.
The court was hearing a petition filed by Capt. Sumeer Saini and other pilots seeking payment of their back wages and other perquisites due to them.
Senior advocate Pinki Anand, appearing for the pilots, said, “Salaries of nearly 450 pilots are due. This petition has got nothing to do with the ongoing agitation. The EMIs (to be paid by pilots) and other things are getting delayed.”
The lawyer was responding to the remarks of Justice Garg that “how can their plea be entertained when they are on strike”.
Anand said that the pilots, who went on a strike from May 7, have not been paid their dues for the period prior to their strike.
The court has now posted the matter for further hearing on July 10.
Lalit Bhasin, counsel for the AI management, opposed the plea of the pilots, saying “their plea cannot be entertained till they end their strike”.
Earlier, Justice Reva Khetrapal had issued contempt notices to 67 striking Air India pilots and their representative body, Indian Pilots Guild (IPG), for disobeying its earlier order by which their stir was termed as illegal.
The high court had on May 9 restrained over 200 agitating pilots from continuing their “illegal strike”, reporting sick and staging demonstrations, a day after the airline management sacked 10 pilots and cancelled the recognition of their union.
The court had also said allowing such a strike to continue would cause irreparable loss to the company as well as huge inconvenience to the passengers travelling by the national carrier.
The IPG had challenged the May 9 ex-parte order of the single judge holding the strike as illegal.
A division bench of the court had, subsequently, dismissed their plea, saying the pilots could not “wilfully and flagrantly” disobeying court orders to end their “illegal” strike and could face contempt action.
The pilots, under the IPG banner, are agitating over the rescheduling of Boeing 787 Dreamliner training and matters relating to their career progression.
The IPG is protesting AI's decision to train pilots of Indian Commercial Pilots Association (ICPA), a union of pilots of erstwhile domestic carrier Indian Airlines, for Dreamliner Boeing aircraft.
Earlier, the AI management had filed an injunction suit terming the strike as illegal and had said due to the pilots' stir, the company was compelled to cancel some of its international flights which had resulted in extreme hardship and also inconvenience to the passengers.
As a result of the cancellation of flights, Air India was facing financial loss of over Rs 10 crore per day, it had said.
Just imagine.
About 300 pilots are holding the whole nation to ransom.
About a 100 pilots have been sacked and another 200 have been threatened with sacking but the management know and so do the union, that all the sacked pilots will be taken back with no loss of pay and no loss of seniority.
That is the way it has always been. That is why these blue collared people earning a thousand times more than the BPL people can cook a snoot at the government.
Just wait till 2013 and your will see one government department / undertaking flexing their muscles to threaten the government over the wage commission awards.
The Congress government shows no inclination of curbing corruption. It is just interested in scoring points over Team Anna representatives by painting them as corrupt.
Standards & Poor have threatened to downgrade India's Credit.
They should scrap the credit-worthiness of India.
With a corrupt Congress government what more could you expect..
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