2020-07-25 : Workers@iitk Amidst the COVID Lockdown (Hamara Manch Update I): RA Tower Mess Report

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Dear Friends,

It is almost four months since the disruptions due to lockdowns and related closure of various activities in the campus. In all these four months there has been little conversation on the workers, how they have been trying to bear the consequences of the disruption at their work, their livelihood, conditions of their families, and related contingencies. As students, regular staff, faculty and administration have been busy coping with contingencies in their own respective domain, we have almost forgotten about those who make the campus habitable every day for us, before the pandemic or even in the present. Many of those workers have continued to serve us in the campus or even some of us long distance, the sanitation workers, the security personnel, the horticulture workers, the civil maintenance, messing, the vendors and retail workers and various other kind of service providers. Hamara Manch has been trying to keep in touch with various kinds of workers amidst all the disruptions in their lives and has now decided to put together their stories and updates as they have reached us in these four months and would come to us in the coming uncertain times. As we put together such updates and

try to verify the information collected to the best of our abilities, we would share them with the concerned IITK community.

In the first of the series, we present the work conditions at the newly started messing facility at RA Towers. In this report we find that workers are working for more than 12 hours on a given day (against the statutory 8 hours) while they are being paid at less than one third of the statutory wages.

The report is attached as a pdf file and also included below as part of email text.

Hamara Manch

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Attachment: RA Tower Mess Report final.pdf