Less than a month after a strike by truck drivers hit operations and added to the wait time of customers for refill cylinders, the Indane bottling plant in Manali is witnessing a labour protest again, this time by the cylinder loading, unloading personnel.
“For four days now, there has been no supply from the plant,” a distributor who gets cylinder supplies from the facility belonging to Indian Oil Tanking Ltd (IOTL) said on Wednesday requesting anonymity.
Though supplies from other plants that have excess capacity are diverted during such situations they are far from adequate. The impact may not be immediate, severe in Chennai, but there is always a possibility of households elsewhere that depend on the excess capacity feeling the heat of the strike, he said. There were, however, reports of the striking workers, who are on contract with lorry operators, deciding to return to work on Thursday following talks.
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Confirming that the bottling operations at the plant were hit since Friday, sources in Indian Oil Corporation also said that the normality was expected from Thursday.
While the distributors sound worried in the backdrop of a surge in refill bookings after the cap on subsidised cylinders was increased for this fiscal from 9 to 11 bottles, sources in IOC say the protest was unlikely to significantly add to the backlog. During the four days of disruption, the other two plants – of IOC – catering to Indane households in and around Chennai supplied loads to the 50-odd distributors, with an estimated five lakh customers, attached to the IOTL plant in Manali.
On the increase in refill bookings, IOC sources said it was the case on the first few days of the announcement. Distributors, however, say they have gone up from around 600 a day to around 800. The IOTL plant, they added, was yet to fully recover from the impact on the truck drivers strike that lasted for 10 days till Pongal. The loads (each load is a little over 300 cylinders) despatched per day varied from 30-40.
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