The strike call has been given by the Co-ordination Committee comprising the representatives of the federations of the employees in Group B to D in the three departments to protest against the fifth pay panel's wage revision recommendations.

It is for the first time that the employees in the three departments have joined hands and have formed a co-ordination committee. While the ministerial staff in the customs department has decided not to join the strike, the rest of 11,000 employees including superintendents, inspectors and sepoys federations have served the notices at Mumbai, Calcutta, Chennai, Cochin, Goa and Vishakhapattanam.

In addition to the preventivestaff, about 1500 customs' appraisers and examiners too have served the strike notices on their respective heads of the departments.

While preventive staff are involved in manning all the gates at docks, supervising containers, minor ports, airports and air cargo complexes and bonds besides rummaging and intelligence, the appraising and examiner staff is involved in clearing export and import cargoes. In Mumbai, since the air customs pool will be joining the strike, passenger clearance is likely to be hampered seriously. The preventive staff are demanding pay parity with similar ranks in the Central Bureau of Intelligence, Intelligence Bureau and the Enforcement directorate. Similar strike notices have been served by over 65,000 strong central excise employees which is controlling excise revenue besides manning land and sea customs, anti-narcotics operations land borders with neighboring countries among others.

More over, even the entire income tax staff at the field formation level will join the strikebringing the daily revenue for exchequer worth over Rs 460 crore to a standstill till the strike goes on. During a meeting with the leaders of the co-ordination committee, KKN Kutty and Shankar Biswas representatives of various federations had claimed that they had exhausted all the avenues before issuing an indefinite strike call. They said that the political leadership dithered on taking a decision leading to a one-day token strike. "Even on the day the employees in the three departments had gone on a token strike the then minister had preferred to stay away from the capital instead of meeting the leaders of the committee," he said.

The political leaders and the Group A staff was forcing the co-ordination committee to approach the fast track committee for settling the issue but the committee did not exist, they claimed adding that even now the co-ordination committee leadership is open to negotiations if the government intended to come to the table but there has not been any indication either from therevenue department or from the ministry. Once the strike commences all export-import activities will come to a halt besides the preventive work and the excise collection all over the country.