Updates following recent visit of five Citizens' Forum alumni to IIT Kanpur

Dated: 2nd April, 2013.

Dear friends, On behalf of Citizens’ Forum, IIT Kanpur, five alumni -- Ashok Gupta (Ohio), Praval Singh (Varanasi), Sushil Handa (Montreal), Vaibhav Vaish (Chennai) and VN Sharma (Ranchi) -- visited the campus from 5th to 8th March, 2013. The purpose of the visit was to add to our understanding of conditions of contract workers by interacting with them, as well as to to impress upon the administration the need to bring about the necessary change. We interacted with the workers, campus community (including both faculty and students), the volunteers of Hamara Manch, and the administration. Below we summarise some of our key lessons. Firstly, we must thank all of you who signed our petition, raised the issue in alumni groups, or kept communicating with the administration on this issue. This pressure has helped! Not only has this communication helped impress upon the administration and the contractors that they cannot get away with blatant violations of legal or human rights, it has also made sure that the workers and community collectives like Hamara Manch find support to raise their issues. This has led to some positive movement forward in, for example, ensuring the payment of legally due compensation in case of accidents, and the safety at workplace. We must however caution that there is still a very very long way to go, and a healthy criticism from the alumni continues to be the need of the hour. So for example, while we have made some dent in payment of ESI and EPF, most workers are still far from being paid the legal minimum wages, the most major component of the payment. And even more gravely -- while some safety practices have been introduced, at present they are mostly formalities and do not reflect a real concern of safety: we learnt not only about the poor quality of personal protective equipment being provided to workers but also about practices which introduce more risk at workplace rather than safety. The arbitrariness in the treatment of workers, especially regarding punishments, hirings and firings continues to be a sore point. We met several groups of workers and learnt about the pathetic treatment they have been met with, often treated as second class citizens, sometimes even rattling with explicit casteism. In fact, we noted with most distress the deteriorating conditions for freedom of expression, particularly affecting the workers, but also seriously affecting the academic community. So while we educated ourselves of several cases of workers being fired for merely raising their concerns, we also learnt about several cases of students who were being severely pressured by their advisors or wardens to not bring to notice genuine issues. We believe that this is completely unacceptable anywhere, even more so in an educational institute. Only by effective democratization of our practices do we hope to move forward anywhere. That said, we find it refreshing that our new Director is more open and willing to understand the genuine concerns. We will continue to wait for this understanding to translate into real action, we do hope that something positive will come out of all this. Please see an action plan we have proposed for the institute at http://iitkcf.appspot.com/wMDG7B. Finally, the most special lesson for us had been the uprightness and dignity of the workers we met. For most of them, the issue was not merely one of wages or of immediate material benefits but one of their dignity, justice and fairness. We were deeply humbled by their uprightness even in the face of adversities and we feel privileged to collaborate with them. We will host documents and reports related to this visit on our website https://sites.google.com/site/iitkcfdevelopment/our-efforts/visits/cf-2013 -- this will include detailed reports as well as our communications with the administration. We thank the volunteers of Hamara Manch for making several of the meetings possible, and the Director for giving us his valuable time. with regards, Alumni associated with Citizens’ Forum https://sites.google.com/site/iitkcfdevelopment/