Minimum Wages Monitoring Committee

• The Minimum Wages Monitoring Committee (MWMC) is a standing Institute committee formed in 2000 by the then IITK Director. A brief background follows: 

  • Faced with increasing pressure from a dedicated group of campus community members, and incontrovertible evidence of widespread violation of Minimum Wage laws on campus, this committee was created with a one-line mandate to oversee all minimum wage related issues with respect to contractual labour employed on campus. 

  • The committee, however, had no executive powers to enforce legal compliance from the contractors. In fact its mandate was completely undefined, but it slowly took over the role of investigating contract labour related issues and recommending suitable courses of action.

  • At one point it also managed to get a mandate of overseeing all wage related payments. This was aided by a large volunteer group, primarily faculty and students, which manned an office for the said purpose six days a week. At the peak, the number of volunteers was around 70 including students, faculty and other community members.

  • The committee had worked assiduously to understand and bring some order / legal compliance into the functioning of the contractual system within the Institute. 

  • If you are interested in more details:

    • The website of this (erstwhile) volunteer run Minimum Wage Monitoring Committee can be accessed on its then chairperson's homepage.

    • The experience of the then committee is also documented in detail in this article : Operationalising labour standards: A case of implementing minimum wages, Manali Chakrabarti, Rahul Varman, March 2005 (A version of the article also appeared in Indian Journal of Labour Economics, 50,1).

However in-spite of a credible effort put under its banner between 2000-2007, the committee now functions as yet another face of the bureaucracy. A perspective on as it evolved is below:

• • The institute refused to extend tenure of the then Chairman in 2007, in-spite of an explicit request by the then volunteers. Instead it appointed a new chairman who had no experience in dealing with the issue, and had never volunteered for the cause. 

  • This happened in wake of several deaths in quick succession in 2007 and there was a clear role of the committee and its volunteers in bringing out detailed reports on the incidents. One can only guess the reasons.

  • As for now, the institute has fully appropriated the committee and thus shunned itself from any criticism or recommendation that would have come had there been in place any autonomus committee. 

  • The result is that the committee is defunct for all practical purposes, and makes no meaningful suggestions, criticisms or participation in the issues of concern, even as we had a regular stream of incidents -- accidents and deaths, visit of labour commissioners, arbitrary punishments and firings -- that have been brought to the fore by Hamara Manch and Citizen's Forum. 

  • Some details of the process, as well as a brief history of community involvement is captured in the following presentation intended for Alumni and given by erstwhile committee chairman (after he was no longer part of the committee):

    • Contract workers: a community perspective, 10th Jan, 2010.

Some members of the associated volunteer group within the campus have since moved on to involve itself with the workers under the banner of Hamara Manch. 

You can find some documentation created by the erstwhile volunteer run committee (pre-2007) on this page.