Bedi and Bedi: Missing EPF deposits

Dated: May 2013.

Four workers in employment with M/S Bedi & Bedi were fired when Hall VIII mess contract was taken away from M/S Bedi & Bedi and given to M/S Kanaka. M/S Bedi & Bedi now has mess contract for Hall VII. Three of these four workers approached us about their EPF accounts for which they had been given no account numbers or information on their balances and we pursued the matter.

• It was found that M/S Bedi & Bedi had issued them Delhi EPF Account numbers while an EPF Office exists in Kanpur. A situation similar to M/S Vihar Aahar who had given Gujarat EPF Account Numbers to some workers.

• Information obtained under RTI indicated their EPF account balances. However when checked online against with the EPF office, we discovered that actual balances were only a fraction of those reported by the institute.

• Since our intervention the balances have been corrected for these workers, however there is no reason to believe that this is also true for other current and former workers.

• M/S Bedi & Bedi is also notorious in paying workers’ wages late. Here is a sample date of payments we obtained for previous month's salary we obtained from a worker: 23 February 2012 (January wages), 25 March 2012 (February wages), and 6 April 2012 (March wages), Note that the law requires that, ”The wages of every person employed as contract labour be paid before the expiry of the seventh day of the wage period in respect of which the wages are payable.”