Death of Shri Jagat Narayan

June 2011.

• • A report put together by Hamara Manch. Excerpts:

    • Shri Jagat Narayan aka Horilal, died while working at a construction site in IIT Kanpur on 1st June 2011. Some of us collected the following information about this tragic death from his colleagues at the work site, his family members and other workers.

    • 2 pm, 1st June 2011, IIT Kanpur

    • We came to know about the accident at around two in the afternoon and immediately rushed to the construction site. The construction site was for faculty residence quarters and the contractor was M/s Raitani (RSV Private Ltd).1 The under construction building has risen to seven floors at present – it is supposed to go even higher. When we tried to enter the site we were stopped at the entrance ...

  • Office Orders issued by the administration in quick succession after two deaths in two weeks.

    Unfortunately, this death came just a couple of week after another death within the campus. The otherwise un-responsive institute seemed particularly perturbed by our reporting these deaths to the broader alumni community.  Perhaps afraid of any negative publicity, institute chose to unofficially counter allegations by Hamara Manch -- we still do not comprehend why an institute official engaging in official communication with the Alumni needs to set up an alternate website away from IITK website to present his views on the incident. You can find the relevant institute email here. You may also want to read the institute critique of Hamara Manch and our response related to the coverage of Shri Rohit's accident on the relevant page.

    In fact this particular accident saw several exchanges between us and the institute. Since some of the responses, directly mailed to the alumni groups by the institute, were just blatantly false and were clear attempt to personally target individuals associated with our volunteer group, one of the alumni amongst us spend some time in the campus investigating the incident and came up with a detailed case study listed below. 

• • Fact Finding Report, Shamim Akhter, 2011.

    You can find the said exchanges below.

• • Letter from Citizen's Forum to Alumni, 31/7/2011.

  • Response from DRPG, 05/08/2011.

  • Citizen's Forum Response, 13/09/2011.

    There was no attempt to rehabilitate the family either. Rinki, wife of Jagat Narayan, was pregnant when the accident took place, and yet pursued her case with dignity and determination. Her grit remains inspiring for all of us. Below you may find the application she wrote to the institute requesting for a substitute job:

• • Application to SE, IWD by Rinki, wife of late Shri Jagat Narayan -- original (in hindi), translation (english).

    The job was never offered, she was told that IWD does not employ any women! Instead, it took a lot of struggling with the bureaucracy to even receive the full compensation. To get a glimpse of the difficulties, take a look at the following update:

• • An Update on the Compensation for Jagat Narain’s family, from Hamara Manch, 18/2/2012

    The full compensation was obtained later that year, almost an year after the accident. Citizen's Forum formally thanked all the alumni who supported the process, and presented its demands to the administration through the following letter.

• • Citizen's Forum letter to alumni on compensation, July 28, 2012

    In the context of two accidents in quick succession, the institute had for a while suspended all construction related activity in the campus, and came up with a one man enquiry committee (PB Vijay Committee). You can also look at its report below:

• •  Vijay committee report (first two pages, since the administration refused to share with us the remaining twenty-eight pages of the report).

    We particularly encourage you to compare it with Hamara Manch reports as well as another institute report on Shri Rohit's accident, to note the callousness and contradictions -- look at the end of this page documenting Shri Rohit's death for these reports and a discussion. As presented, the report seems as a shoddy piece of work, demonstrating no attempt at understanding the incident and merely hastening to reach preconceived conclusions.