A section of employees at NTPC is protesting against the performance-linked payment mechanism put in place by the public sector power producer from the current financial year.

The aggrieved employees belong to E1 (entry position) till E7 (Deputy General Manager) levels.

“Nearly 11,000 employees are protesting across all power stations of NTPC,” said Rakesh Pandey, Chairman of NTPC Executives' Federation of India.

According to the executives federation, the company is categorising the bottom 10 per cent of executives as non-performing and has denied payment of performance-linked incentives to them. Though the protesting employees are not completely against this mechanism, they feel that there is no justice in totally denying any payment.

“The company can set a performance target- say 80 or 95 per cent. But, depriving the bottom 10 per cent of any payment is not proper,” Pandey said.

Simply put, there are examples of new-recruit engineers, hired from IITs, showing performance of more than 90 per cent. But in the overall average, their performance figures in the bottom 10 per cent. Hence, they are not getting any performance-linked pay.

Till now, operations at any of the NTPC power stations are not impacted. The largest power producer in the country operates 15 coal-fired and 7 gas-fired stations on standalone basis. This accounts to nearly 41,000 mw.

When contacted, NTPC spokesperson said that the performance linked payment is as per guidelines issued by the Department of Public Enterprises. “This is a step towards enhancing productivity,” he added.

>siddhartha.s@thehindu.co.in

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