ven as protests galore over the unauthorised parking of trucks along the Container Terminal Road, the container trucks operating to the Vallarpadam International Container Transshipment Terminal (ICTT) will remain off the road for the 24 hours starting from Monday midnight.
The strike, announced by the Trade Union Coordination committee, a combine of 10 unions of container carrier employees, was called to protest against the alleged attacks by local residents against the crew of container carriers to Vallarpadam. As many as 2,000 carriers and 3,000 employees will be taking part in the token strike. “If the authorities fail to solve the issue within fifteen days, we have no other options but to launch an indefinite strike,” said P.S. Ashik, chairman of the organisation. The other key demands raised by the organisations include opening of dedicated parking facility for container carriers operating to the ICTT and shifting of the handling of coastal containers to the Rajiv Gandhi Container Terminal from ICTT.
According to the organisation, the truck employees are being forced to park the vehicles on sideways of the road in the absence of a dedicated parking facility. “At a meeting in February 2014, the Cochin Port Trust (CPT) authorities had promised to arrange a dedicated parking facility for trucks operating to the ICTT within three months. The interventions from the District Collector, who served an ultimatum to the CPT on this, also failed to work,” pointed out Mr. Ashik. The strike comes at a time even as District Collector M.G. Rajamanickam is slated to convene a meeting of the stakeholder agencies, including the police, Cochin Port Trust, DP World and the National Highway Authority of India, to chalk out an action plan to check the rising number of accidents on the stretch. The steps proposed include setting up of street lights and deployment of private security for regulating parking on the sideways.
Meanwhile, a proposal by the CPT to lease out a four-acre property near Vallarpadam and another location at Bolghatty Island for setting up the parking facility is yet to take off as its tender inviting proposal for developing and operating a truck parking terminal received a cold response. It has now re-tendered the proposal for the fourth time.
The CPT officials also criticised the strike move and pointed out that many of the trailers parked on the road were not bound to the ICTT. “On an average, about 1,000 trucks are operating daily to the ICTT and there is no need for any trucks to wait for such longer periods to arrive their turn. They are also not ready to use the available space either, which is evident from their haphazard parking on the road,” said a senior CPT official.
