The Federation of West Bengal Truck Operators Association today joined the nation-wide strike called by All-India Motor Transport Congress (AIMTC) and decided today to wait till January 7 for the results of negotiations with the Centre before taking a final decision on the issue.
The state government was exerting pressure on truckers in the state to stay out of the strike.
The West Bengal wing of the AIMTC was expected to stay away from the strike.
"Truck operators in West Bengal have gone on strike from 6am and nearly 60 per cent of the trucks in the state did not ply today", said S Majumdar, general secretary of the Federation.
Nearly 1.67 lakh trucks under various operators were members of the Federation.
"In case nothing fruitful comes out of this negotiation, we will reconsider our decision to support this indefinite strike", he said.
"We want import duty on tyres to be slashed by 35 per cent. Chinese imports were cheaper by Rs5000-7000 compared to locally manufactured tyres", Majumdar said.
Even as the Federation claimed that there would be no impact on prices for the coming three to four days, prices of commodities including agricultural commodities went up today.
Traffic handled by Kolkata Port Trust (KoPT) was expected to be affected in the next few days.
While the Kolkata Dock System (KDS) handled around 200 to 250 trucks daily, the Haldia dock complex (HDC) handled 500 trucks per day.
"Bulk of the cargo from the port actually then travelled by road. The railway's share in moving cargo to and from the port's hinterland in Haldia was around 20 per cent last year, and around 2 per cent at Kolkata", said a senior port official.
He said that traffic movement at KoPT was not affected today.
However, the situation was likely to worsen as nearly 50 ships were waiting at Sandheads to enter the Haldia docks.
HDC is now handling arrival-departures of more than 13 ships per day, and a cargo bottleneck appeared inevitable if trucks were not available to clear the cargo.
While admitting some movement of trucks today to unload cargo, it appeared that movement of perishable goods like fish and vegetables had been relaxed till January 7, if Truck Owners Association of Bengal president S Ghosh was to be believed.
Inter-state truck movement from and to Kolkata was around 16,000 trucks on an average per day.
The total number of registered trucks in the state was 3.25 lakh.
A meeting between the Union transport secretary and AIMTC was likely to be held on Tuesday and the transport department could forward a proposal to the finance department and the petroleum ministry subsequently.
AIMTC demanded among other things, a Rs10 cut in diesel prices on account of the falling crude prices in the international market.
It sought rationalisation of tyre prices too.
Diesel prices were Rs36 a litre now. Average prices of truck tyres was around Rs24,000 per tyre now. Trucks carrying perishable goods and medicines were outside the strike.
