2014-04-24 : To Alumni Association Board.

From: Citizen's Forum

To: Members, Alumni Association Board; DORA, IITK

Subject: Telephone exchange workers

Date: Thu, 24 Apr 2014 18:44:35 +0000

Dear Board Members,

If you imagine that one of us, or one of our fellow alumni graduates has been working for an employer for over 10 years, and he (or she) has been getting a regular monthly salary and yearly raises for: good work, increase in productivity and mehngai (inflation). Then one day suddenly his employer decides that he no longer needs to pay you, or our fellow alumni what he (or she) has been earning monthly and can now be reduced to half of what he (or she) received per month. How will you react? Would you not be shocked and outraged? Of course, any one of us will. We would have come to rely on that monthly income to support our families and it would be a serious hardship. And yet this is what has happened to telephone exchange workers at IITK. In December 2013 their salary was slashed form Rs. 13,294 per month to Rs. 7,164 per month when IITK changed contractors to manage its Telephone Exchange.

We in the alumni community believe that this is totally unacceptable.  We have written to the Director about this. We would like Alumni Association to look at this predicament of workers who have so far provided an extremely necessary service and done so efficiently.  It is the same set of workers; their work continues to be the same as before i.e. handling 5000 lines and also liaising with the computer centre to maintain the 450 IP phones in this new dispensation. We understand that IITK has had a well functioning and reliable telephone system and an envy of many institutions. 

The Institute has allocated adequate amount for salaries and wages in its new contract, which would allow fair wages for the workers and yet the new contractor is taking advantage of the changing situation and has engaged in an outright exploitation of the same set of workers that were working with the old contractor.

We the undersigned are requesting AA Board to consider the issues and reach out to other alumni, campus community and the administration to help rectify the dismal situation these workers have been put into. The contractor should be asked to respect the spirit of the contract and pay the workers at least November 2013 level wages – the wages they were receiving from the old contractor.

We thank you in advance hoping that you will consider our request.

Sincerely yours

Manu Agrawal (Batch of 2011)             Sandeep Agarwal (Batch of 1983)

Shamim Akhter (Batch of 2007)        Arun Karthik B. (Batch of 2012)

Deepankar Basu (Batch of 1994)      Grishma (Batch of 2005)

Sushil Handa (Batch of 1966)           Himanshu ( Batch of 2005)

Pradeep Kumar (Batch of 2013)        Rajesh Kumar (Batch of 2007)

Vivek Mehta (Batch of )                   Manish Mishra (Batch of 2004)                               

Siddartha Mitra (Batch of)                Arvind Muthuswamy (Batch of2012)

Ajeeta Nyola (Batch of 2005)           Binoy Raveendran(Batch of2012)

Rajen Sahai (Batch of 1966)            V N Sharma (Batch of 1978)

Shivani (Batch of 1999)                   Amit Singh (Batch of 2005)

Dheeraj Singh (Batch of 2004)         Praval Singh (Batch of 1974)                    

Vaibhav Vaish (Batch of 2004)         Yash  Mahendra  (Batch of 2006)