Forum Visit in March 2013

A team of 5 Citizens' Forum members -- Ashok Gupta (Ohio, 1972 batch), Praval Sinha (Varanasi, 1974 batch), Sushil Handa (Montreal, 1966 batch), Vaibhav Vaish (Chennai, 2004 batch) and VN Sharma (Ranchi, 1976 batch and also former employee 1965-1979), visited the campus from March 5th to March 8th, 2013. The primary agenda was to understand better the situation of contract workers, as well as to to impress upon the administration the need to bring about the necessary change. In this endeavour they met several groups of workers as well as students, faculty members, other associated community members and administrative officials including the director.

In context of this visit, we have send the following update to the alumni: Brief summary of our learnings : an update to the alumni

Primarily as a followup to our meeting with the director, we came up with following: Action Items for IIT.

Please find some related meeting notes below:

1. March 5th, 2013, 4:00pm, meeting with Vishnu Shukla (labour lawyer).

2. March 5th, 2013, 6:30pm, meeting with engaged students and faculty.

3. March 6th, 11:00am, meeting with director and other administrative officials.

4. March 6th, 4:00pm, meeting with workers from erstwhile Environmental Building construction site.

5. March 6th, 5:30pm, Hamara Manch meeting.

6. March 7th, 9:00am, meeting with workers with ongoing cases.

7. March 7th, 4:30pm, meeting with Valmiki Samaj representatives.

8. March 7th, 6:30pm, meeting with Faculty and Students.

9. March 7th, 9:30pm, meeting with Prayas volunteers.

Note that apart from this there were several unscheduled meetings with community members, workers as well as administrative officials. Also note that the director had an unscheduled two hour meeting with three Forum members (Ashok, Sushil, and Saurabh) in the alumni meet at Delhi which was held the day before. That was also attended by half a dozen other administrators (faculty) and alumni at the invitation of the director.