Preface and Update

On April 24, 2024, the Institute surreptitiously floated mega tender that was likely to endanger the livelihood of hundreds of workers. The tender bid was due to be opened on the 17th of May, which left us with barely a couple of working days to respond to it. We immediately initiated conversation on it through our volunteers in hostels as well as among the rest of the Institute community.  But yesterday, for inexplicable reasons (probably due to technical inconsistencies in the present document) the Institute has scrapped the tender. And yet we have learnt from several reliable sources that the Institute is likely to refloat the tender very soon. We had a large meeting at Hamara Manch yesterday (15th May 2024) which was attended by workers across contracts, students and other community members and it was decided that we should continue our efforts to voice our grave concerns on the new regime that the new tender is likely to bring. The Institute seems to be keen to bring in large scale mechanisation through large contractors even if it implies massive extra cost and often deterioration of the quality of services. We have seen this trend in several recent contracts including Water Supply and Wastewater Contract, Road Cleaning Contract, etc. Further, while the tender has to do with the critical hostel services, most of the student bodies and office bearers have little information about it. Most importantly, it compromises the rights and livelihoods of the workers who have been sincerely and effectively serving the Institute community for years and decades. And we at Hamara Manch believe this is highly problematic. Hence we are sharing the note below in spite of the specific tender being mentioned here having been scrapped for now.

See here for the full report. 

Our Concerns

The services in the hostels have been running effectively and efficiently over decades with the present arrangements. The performance record of the contractors and workers is testimony to that. Minor issues which mostly emanated from shortage of manpower (the Institute has been consistently reducing manpower citing cost cutting measures) could have been easily addressed by increasing the workforce marginally. It would have been way more cost effective without any disruption. So why is the Institute creating this new kind of tender? And why has it not taken the student community in confidence for this new arrangement for running essential services in hostels? Before a new tender is floated these concerns ought to be addressed by the concerned authorities.

In case you would like to see it first-hand, the new tender document is available here and one of the three previous contracts is available here.