By Ifham Nizam

Many professionals including medical specialists were spending days and nights in fuel queues, but the engineers of the Ceylon Electricity Board had no such problem as the government giving priority to supplying fuel for power generation, a senior Power and Energy Ministry official said.

Despite everyone else undergoing untold hardships trying to find fuel, CEB engineers have been happily tapping into the large diesel reserves at the Kelanitissa power plant, The Island reliably learns.The official said: “Ironically, CEB has no rupees to pay CPC even when the Treasury scrapes the barrel to find the dollars to pay for fuel imports. Therefore, CEB is forced to get short-term loans from commercial banks at exorbitant interest rates, generally

above 30%, to pay for its fuel and monthly salaries and generous allowances of its employees.”

Several CEB employees contacted by The Island including veteran trade unionist Ranjan Jayalal were of the opinion that it is a crime for the CEB to use the diesel supplied by the government for power generation, often depriving other critical needs such as public transport, school vans, transport of daily food items like fish and vegetables and agricultural needs, to maintain the lifestyle of a set of privileged state employees.

According to these CEB employees, long lines of CEB vehicles used by engineers have become a common sight at the Kelanitissa power station. These vehicles often carry barrels and other containers to take additional diesel supplies.These employees complain that although diesel is issued from the Kelanitissa storage under the guise of supplying the essential needs of maintenance and breakdown vehicles, only a small fraction of that fuel is allocated to CEB’s field vehicles.

The engineers in the meantime have an almost unrestricted supply of diesel for their official and private travel (sometimes including daily travel of their spouses), despite the people agonising in long fuel queues all over the country.In fact, CEB has been advising its customers that the time taken to attend to breakdown complaints will take longer because its maintenance vehicles cannot get sufficient fuel.

CEB engineers are allowed home travel and an additional private mileage ranging from 600-900 kilometers per month. Although the daily travel between home and office is limited to 20km each way, some engineers travel to Colombo daily from places like Wennappuwa, Negombo, Panadura, and even more distant places such as Ratnapura. Apparently, the fuel shortage has not deterred these engineers from using the home travel as well as the additional private mileage allowance.

It is understood that when the CEB General Manager recently announced that the private mileage allowance of engineers would be reduced by 50%, engineers protested vehemently against that decision. Many CEB employees question why this decision had angered the engineers so much when there is no fuel even to manage CEB’s day-to-day maintenance work in most areas.

It is also learnt that some CEB engineers who had been allocated petrol vehicles had quickly switched to diesel ones because of the ready availability of the fuel from CEB’s Kelanitissa storage facility.

Its employees complain that even the engineers attached to project work in the Project Division continue to clock the same mileage as before, although the project work has come to a standstill because of the foreign exchange shortage and the resulting shortage of essential materials like steel, cement as well as CEB’s inability to open LCs for essential imports of new equipment.