Shillong, June 13: The Coordination Committee of Registered MeECL (Employees) Associations and Unions (CCORMAU) has demanded the state government to revoke the order which banned job recruitment in the Meghalaya Energy Corporation Limited (MeECL).

After a meeting with the Deputy Chief Minister in-charge Power, Prestone Tynsong, on Monday, CCORMAU president P. Shullet said that the issue was discussed as prior to the order MeECL had the autonomy to conduct job recruitment on its own.

However, subsequent to the order, there are large number of vacancies at the field level, jugalis, technicians, junior engineers, assistant engineers etc despite these being important posts in MeECL, which is purely a technical organization, he said.

Shullet informed that the deputy chief minister during the meeting had assured that the government is in the process of lifting the ban.

“We are very happy to say that the minister has already taken steps in this direction…for revocation of this order,” he added.

Further, the CCORMAU president informed that the delegation had also sought the intervention of the deputy chief minister for regularizing contractual employees of the MeECL.

There are over 1700 contractual employees, who comprise about 30-40 % of the manpower strength of the MeECL and who have been serving for more than 20 years.

“They are still getting paid with a meagre amount of Rs 10,000 to Rs 15,000. This is inhumane and the minister also agreed to this point,” Shullet said while adding “He (Tynsong) had initiated some steps in this direction and we welcome it. It is in the process and we look forward that in due course of time this will be taken care of.”

Meanwhile, the CCORMAU also requested the state government to consider allotting projects to the MeECL.

“We know the potential of the state is more than 3,000 megawatt (MW) but hardly about 10-15% of that has been harnessed till today. We want to go back to those good olden days when in the erstwhile MeSEB, we used to have surplus of power and even selling power to neighboring states,” he said while adding “the deputy chief minister said that he already had this in mind about giving projects to the MeECL.”

Shullet said that they welcomed the different kinds of reforms proposed by the state government for overall improvement of the power sector.