Coal India to train sons of women VRS employees

Trade unions, especially the INTUC-affiliated Rashtriya Koyla Khadan Mazdoor Sangh, welcomed the move.

Coal India Ltd. (CIL) has proposed a voluntary retirement scheme (VRS) for a certain category of its unskilled female employees under which it will train sons of the VRS optees, if they are found employable.

The scheme, which aims at boosting CIL’s technical manpower, will remain effective for six months after its notification, which is imminent now, according to CIL sources.

Called the Special Female Voluntary Retirement Scheme, 2015, the scheme targets the vast number of unskilled women employees at CIL’s head office and its eight subsidiaries, who got compensatory employment on various grounds.

“They normally do maintenance jobs not directly related with production,” a senior CIL official told The Hindu, adding that their number is around 25,000.

Under this proposed scheme, a regular female employee who has completed 10 years of service but has not reached 58 years, can retire from service while nominating a son, who is a matriculate, between 18 and 30 years. He would be appropriately trained, at company cost, if found medically fit. He would also get a stipend while his mother retires with the normal statutory benefits in her kitty.

Trade unions, especially the INTUC-affiliated Rashtriya Koyla Khadan Mazdoor Sangh, welcomed the move.

Enquiries revealed that CIL has already pruned this category of female employees by around 2700 through two rounds of VRS since June 2014. However, it sweetened the scheme with the training offer to hasten the process of recruiting technical hands as it races to double its production level of one billion tonnes by 2020.

The scheme’s objective is to meet the requirement of statutory/technical requirement by training the nominated son of a female VRS optee in various trades. Declining to be quoted as he was not the authorised spokesperson, the official said that in the two earlier schemes, there was no scope for formal training as it was on the job. It may be mentioned that over the last decade CIL’s workforce has been pruned by nearly 50 per cent. It now has on its rolls some 3.2 lakh employees.