Environmental Building Construction Site

Ongoing since 2007.

Update on the court case (May 2014):

    The court case saw several dates with mostly judges or contractors’ representatives not showing up. In the process, the collective of daily wagers pushing the case dwindled, but was kept alive through the energetic and charismatic Ramkesh ji, a very skilled mason. He died in a “road accident” on August 3rd, 2013. 

    The case itself is stuck on the following technicality since more than a year now: there has been a typo in the reference that came from Delhi office, a date being mentioned 31 Jun instead of 31 Jan (note that there is no 31st June). Last I heard (May 2014), after a lot of running about, some middle class friends managed to get a new letter from Delhi office correcting the date but with a more severe mistake (the context of the date is quoted wrongly).

    The case may well have entered a forever limbo!

Previous summary:

    As usual the case involved underpayment of wages and under-reporting of workers. The workers complained formally in 2007, but it is they who paid in the end by losing their jobs. In this particular case, the workers also approached labor court (late 2009), but till date (late 2012), the case is still pending. You can find a summary and related documents below:

Summary

    Construction of the Environmental building started in mid 2006, and was completed in early 2008. It was funded by MPLADS fund of Arun Shourie. This site employed about 100 to 130 workers every day and the contractor never paid legal wages and regularly under-reported workers. This and several other anomalies were noted by the then minimum wage monitoring committee volunteers, for example in this detailed report.

    The volunteers of Minimum Wage Monitoring Committee had being pursuing the workers to file complaints in case there were illegalities. In mid 2007, institute was under pressure due to several recent deaths which also generated some media coverage. Senior officials including the director visited some of the sites and it seemed that the institute was serious regarding the rights of contract workers. Encouraged, a group of workers refused to give back their rightful wages to the contractor (it was a practice that the full wages was paid in front of Minimum Wage Monitoring Committee to select workers but later sought back). They also filed a formal complaint with the institute.

    Retaliating, the contractor fired the workers. However under severe community pressure (which was particularly consolidated because of the recent deaths), he was forced to re-employ them. The reaction of the institute however was to co-opt the Minimum Wages Monitoring Committee (see the brief history of the committee here), and also create a separate, rather partisan committee to look into the issue. The committee report and our comments on the same are available on this page. Arbitrariness of the report later gave rise to several RTIs questioning how the exact figures mentioned as dues in that report were arrived at; institute's response -- it has forgotten! Also the contractor quickly made the committee recommended payments (which were substantially less than the claim) and dismissed the 25 odd workers, even though some of these workers had been working in the institute since almost twenty years and mostly with the same contractor!

    The workers approached the institute and the Minimum Wage Monitoring Committee for redressal. By then the pressure generated by the media coverage of deaths had evaporated and the institute felt no obligation to pursue matters further. The committee itself no longer being volunteer run made the workers go round in offices. One of these days they were asked to meet registrar who used SIS to intimidate the workers, banned their entry in the campus, and condescendingly told them to approach court for any redressal. A brief summary of events on that day can be found in this Hamara Manch update.

    The workers took the advice seriously, and approached the labor court (central) in October 2009. This has since consumed the most energetic of them and in spite of an enormous middle class effort contributing to the process as well, the case is nowhere near completion.

    For quite a long time they were stalled on technicalities. Finding out the procedures as well as creating exact documentation and claims extracted enormous energies from both the workers and middle class supporters. Proceedings require an initial attempt at conciliation, apparently there was an attempt at stalling and even forced settlement. With middle class support the case moved beyond this stage (hanging there for about two years), but then a permission is needed from the Delhi office that the case can indeed proceed. The file containing the same was lost and was found only with middle class intervention at the highest offices! 

    Since the hearings commenced in April 2012, in three of four the judge has been missing and in the last one, contractor absent. Tired, half the workers have already left Kanpur for their hometown. The case is still ongoing (as of November 2012).