HYDERABAD, Feb 9: The Johi Awami Ittehad warned on Friday that it would launch a protest campaign against the BHP Billiton, a multinational gas exploration company, and continue protesting until the government cancelled the company’s licence for spreading pollution, destroying infrastructure, depriving local people of jobs and patronising dummy organisations.

The Ittehad’s convenor Qurban Khokhar, Young Samaji Tanzeem President Sawan Khan Babar, local leader of People’s Party Parliamentarians Jan Mohammad Pahore and a noted poet Ahmed Khan Madhosh demanded at a news conference at the press club that if the company did not accept their demands within a month they would stage a series of protests, which might include shutter-down strikes.

They complained that the company, which was earning tens of millions of rupees from its gas wells in the area, had done nothing to control smoke emissions and provide jobs to local people.

They said that the company, since it started production in 1998-99, started patronising its brokers and agents by awarding them small contracts. The company’s development funds found their way to dummy organisation it had itself set up, they said and added that the people were being pitted against one another under the company’s "divide and rule" policy.

They said that the company was recruiting people from other provinces at the cost of locals and was using the methods, which often resulted in depriving the poor farmers of their land. The government should direct the company to announce a clear-cut policy about the sale and purchase of land in the area, they said.They said that the area people had been staging protest demonstrations, rallies and hunger strikes over the years and even the elected representatives had raised voice against the company’s excesses but all in vain.

The leaders demanded that the agreement signed between the company and the government should be made public, the share of provincial government in respect of gas development surcharge should be raised and 70 per cent of the surcharge should be spent on development in the area as per international rules.

They urged the company to do something about controlling pollution, freeze flow of funds to the bogus organisations and get their accounts audited by senior government functionaries and local people.