A claim is getting viral on social media. According to this claim, Heavy Engineering Corporation (HEC) engineers remained unpaid for the past 17 months despite delivering the launch pad of Chandrayaan 3 ahead of schedule.
South India Index tweeted and claimed: “India: ISRO Engineers, who worked on launching of India’s Moon Mission, didn’t get salaries for over 17 months. Engineers protested for months but were told by department that there are no funds for pay disbursement. Chandrayaan-3 engineers were told by authorities that their contract will be revoked if they protested about it. If Chandrayaan succeeds to make a soft landing on moon, will become the only 4th country in world to do so”.
Tweet Archive Link
In support of its claim, South India Index gave the reference to a news article with the headline “Engineers Who Built Chandrayaan-3 Launch Pad Weren’t Paid Salaries for Over a Year: Report” published by the news website ‘The Wire’ on July 17, 2023. However, there is no mention of ISRO in this news.
Source: thewire
Moreover, several media houses including the well-Known newspaper ‘Danik Bhaskhar’ and renowned news channel ‘AAJ TAK’ published this news with similar claims.
Source: Bhaskar, zeebiz, navbharattimes, cnbctv18, siasat, & bharattimes
To verify the authenticity of this viral claim, the Dfrac team reverse-searched it on Google in this context. We found some media reports during this process.
News website Times of India published news on April 02, 2023, with the Headline: “HEC officials withdraw 150-day strike”. In this news, the Times of India revealed: “Ranchi: Nearly 300 executives of Heavy Engineering Corporation withdrew their 150 days strike after PSU agreed to release two-month salary to both executives and workers and promised to take effective steps to release the balance of all outstanding salaries in future.
HEC executives had been on indefinite strike since 3 November 2022, demanding payment of all outstanding salaries. While the executives have not been paid salaries for the past 16 and half months, workers have been going without wages for the past 12 months”.
In addition to that, the Times of India published another news with the headline: “HEC, Mecon engineers cheer as Chandrayaan-3 lifts off”. According to this news, Heavy Engineering Corporations Ltd. (HEC) is not an official partner of ISRO but the company has played a significant role in delivering the launch pad of Chandrayaan 3.
In fact, before 2004-2005, ISRO used to import launch pads from abroad. In 2008, the then President APJ Abdul Kalam, was highly impressed at PSU’s capabilities and expertise in various fields. Later, HEC was awarded the contract to manufacture the mobile launch pad, horizontal sliding door, and tower crane among others by ISRO.
It is clearly evident that there is no salary dispute among ISRO engineers as the South India Index claims.
The Dfrac team has published several Fact-Check reports on South India Index, which can be read here.
Conclusion
It is clear from DFRAC’s Fact-Check that the claim of other media houses, including the South India Index, is misleading since HEC is not an official partner of ISRO. The salary dispute among HEC engineers was settled in April 2023.
