In Memory of Ramkishanji of the Environment Building 

In Memory of Ramkishanji of the Environment Building 

Hamara Manch, June 2025

Ramkishanji, one of the founding members of Hamara Manch, left us on 28th May 2025. He died of an aggressive cancer of the throat, which did not allow much time for any form of intervention. He was in his late 50s. As we mourn his loss, we also need to celebrate his life, our association with him, and the story of a unique effort named Hamra Manch.  Ramkishanji was a storyteller, and should he be writing this piece it would have been much more colourful - episodes of setbacks and jubilation interspersed with fables, couplets and anecdotes. It takes a while to get in sync with his style of narration but once one grooves in, one would not want it any other way. We are not as gifted but the story we believe needs to be shared anyway.

Ramkishanji was a very skilled mason. In 2007 he and several of his colleagues were constructing the Environmental Science building in IIT Kanpur. The construction crew included around 30 skilled masons and over a couple of hundreds ‘unskilled’ workers, many of them migrants from Malda (West Bengal), Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh. The masons were mostly local who came from the hinterlands of the district and had been associated with construction work in the Institute for decades. The abysmal work conditions and the low wages paid to the migrant workers was apparently what pushed these skilled masons to approach MWMC, the volunteer-run effort which monitored minimum wages for contract workers in the campus. They were asked to approach us (MWMC) by late Mohammad Islam who was president of the Karmchari Sangathan at the time. Islam bhai was a permanent worker in the Institute who always stood for all workers’ rights.

Full tribute attached as a pdf . Hindi version of the tribute can be accessed here.