Agitation at NAC called off, raising hope for national flag-carrier

KATHMANDU: OCT. 12 – The protest going on at the Nepal Airlines Corporation (NAC), the national flag carrier, since the last 104 days has been called off. With this, NAC, which was disturbed due to the agitation for a long, is expected to return to normal business.

The trade unions in the NAC had been agitating saying the airlines was being privatized after the process was forwarded to take NAC to the company model. They had been protesting the move, holding sit-ins and chanting slogans continuously in office hours from July 2 to October 11. The employees had been organizing a sit-in protest programme from 10 am to 1 pm every day at the NAC Head Office at local New Road.

An environment has created wherein it is hoped the NAC’s problems would be resolved with the appointment of the Minister for Culture, Tourism and Civil Aviation, the line minister, nearly after three months. Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba on October 8 appointed Prem Ale to the post of Minister for Culture, Tourism and Civil Aviation.

Minister Ale had declared while taking charge of his office that the NAC would be taken ahead in a more consolidated and effective manner. Following discussions with Minister Ale on Monday, the NAC agitating trade unions said their protest programmes had been called off. They informed the Minister that all the protest programmes were put off.

Nepal National Employees Union NAC branch president Subas Dangi said all the programmes of agitation have been called off following understanding reached between Minister Ale and the NAC employees to resolve as per the law the problems said to arise regarding NAC general manager Dim Prakash Poudel.

“Agreement has been reached to resolve the problem between the General Manager and the employees. The Minister has given us 15 days’ time to sort out the problem so we have suspended the protest programmes,” Dangi said.

The employees had been agitating accusing the General Manager Poudel of pushing the NAC towards loss and bringing a policy detrimental to its future.

Poudel could not attend office for 102 days due to the protests. He believes that it will be easy to carry out the regular business of the Corporation now that the agitation is over.

-RSS