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Covid-19 Cases At Bajaj's Waluj Plant Near 300, Company Warns Of Full Pay Cut For Absent Employees
Bajaj Auto MD Rajiv Bajaj (Pic Via Facebook)
The total Covid-19 positive cases in Bajaj Auto's Waluj plant at Aurangabad are nearing 300 and around six to eight employees have already died due to the viral infection, Livemint has reported.
The worker unions on Saturday (4 July) had demanded that the plant be temporarily closed for a few weeks in light of the rapid infection spread. The plant's management though has reportedly insisted on continuing operations for six days a week.
The company is also said to have sent a letter to the employees stating that it will not pay employees who do not come to work.
"If an employee remains absent at office or plant due to any reason despite being asked by the company...then his or her salary would be deducted 100 per cent during the period", said the letter.
The company also claims that there is no point in closing the plant as its employees would continue to gather for social events.
The Waluj plant is operating at 50 per cent capacity since 1 July and the work hours run from 6.30 AM to 12.30 AM in two shifts.
Rajiv Bajaj, the managing director of the company, has been a trenchant critic of lockdown as a method to control the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. He had advocated homeopathy and herd immunity as the way forward to combat the novel coronavirus pandemic.
Bajaj had said that homeopathy has been documented to be quite effective in pandemics similar to coronavirus. He claimed that both in 1918 Spanish Flu or the recent Cuban epidemic, the doctors who treated their patients with homeopathy lost a fraction of patients as compared to those who were treated with allopathic medicine.
In a video conversation with Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, Bajaj (whose family enjoys close proximity with the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty) termed the lockdown "draconian" and claimed that such steps were not even enforced during the World War.
"The way India has been locked down is draconian. We tried to implement a hard lockdown which was porous. So I think we have ended up with the worst of both worlds," Bajaj scion (who incidentally was named after late PM Rajiv Gandhi) told the Congress leader.
Bajaj also mocked the lockdown saying that while it was aimed at flattening the Covid curve it instead ended up flattening a very different curve — the growth (GDP) curve.
During the discussion with the Wayanad MP, Bajaj opined that India tried to emulate Europe and the US rather than Japan and South Korea.
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