TOI and Indian Express the Snake Bite Case

Once again I came to know via Abi's blog that TOI and Indian Express have covered the snakebite case at IITK. Many had asked me the name of the doctor, according to TOI it was Meera Kumar. From the TOI article-

Rahul was son of Sudhir from Malda in West Bengal who was working as labourer under a contractor at Indian Institute of Technology-Kanpur (IIT-K). At about 4.45 am on Sunday, Rahul had suffered the snakebite at his hutment near construction site of the environment engineering building.
His relatives rushed him to the IIT-K health centre. But the doctor-on-duty Meera Batra (as per the official duty register) allegedly refused to attend him, as he was an outsider and not entitled to medical facilities. The boy was finally rushed to the LLR Hospital only to be declared brought-dead.

A group of students is so incensed at the incident that they first held a condolence meeting and later took out a march to the health centre seeking an explanation from chief medical Officer (CMO) Dr Nirmal Kumar.

The students circulated a mail among the IIT-K fraternity highlighting the gross negligence on the part of the doctor and subsequent death of the boy.

I liked to that email here in an earlier post.

Online Petition for the Deaths at IITK

Association for India's Development is running an online petition to get compensation for the family of the people who died recently at IITK. Please sign it.

We are shocked to hear about the death of a laborer's child in Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur and the apathy of the administration towards this incident. The Institute's Health Center refused to admit the child on August 25, 2007 when he was bitten by a snake/scorpion, and knocked at its door, battling for his life. Within a week there was another death on campus -- Mr Udayvir Yadav, a worker who was not provided proper electricity connection to equipment he was using, was killed by electrocution on August 30. These two incidents suggest poor and exploitative working conditions within the IIT campus at Kanpur, India.

These are avoidable deaths that have occurred on grounds of an Institute that claims excellence in technology internationally. We expect that good technical institutions would provide technically safe and efficient working conditions in their campuses, as required by human rights legislature, born out of equal respect for the lives of the elite and labouring classes. These events expose a completely opposite picture.

Update- The Recent Deaths at IITK

Another email from the campus
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Dear members of IITK community,

The Institute has formed a committee to enquire into the incident that took place at the Health Centre in the early hours of August 25, 2007 in its totality . Shameful as that incident is we think a much more basic issue relating to the rights and welfare of an estimated 2000+ contract
workers on campus has been /completely/ missed out and is the root cause for such incidents. A few weeks earlier some contract workers told us that another death had happened in the same vicinity at a construction site and the person s body had been whisked away. No information was
available on the cause of the death. One of us wrote an email to the Director requesting that this be investigated. Since no body was available and no records are maintained there was no way to establish the death and to determine whether it was due to natural causes, an accident or was work related. No response has been received to this request. In fact, the Institute has been turning a blind eye to problems faced by contract workers on campus even when an Institute appointed committee (the Minimum Wage Monitoring Committee and its volunteers) has
repeatedly brought this to its notice. The Institute, as the principal employer, is both liable and responsible for implementing the provisions of the Minimum Wage, Contract Labour and other applicable acts.

Thus the primary problem is not just negligence by one or more individuals. The core issue is the Institute s policy of all pervasive neglect of a group of people, which in turn sends signals to others who are expected to implement it. In meeting after meeting we have come across a mindset that believes that worker exploitation is an inevitable artifact of the Indian landscape and that the Institute cannot and is not meant to solve societal and livelihood problems, even those for which it has legal and moral responsibility. Service after service has been contracted out over the years and the number of contract workers and their dependants on campus have continued to swell. There is thus a large body of people on campus who are invisible and the Institute pretends that they are none of its business. Obviously, under these circumstances unfortunate incidents like the one above are bound to occur.

At present the Institute has 2000+ contract workers working in pathetic conditions. They are the backbone of support services like student messing, cleaning, horticulture, civil, electrical and other maintenance, security and several other services. A large chunk are construction workers (this boy was the son of one such worker). Many such workers are migrant workers from far off places who are brought, often with their families, for 50 day cycles and work 12 hour days in
close to bonded labour conditions. In student messes workers are abused, beaten and intimidated. Most work 12-16 hours per day and a significant fraction of the wage that is ostensibly paid is forcibly taken back later. Yet the same contractors continue to get contracts. All this has been reported to the administration countless times verbally, in writing and through formal reports.

We believe a few simple measures can make a big difference and have repeatedly suggested that there should be minimum records the list of workers, their employment cards, bank accounts, due process before firing a person. But there is enormous resistance to implementing these
minimum legal requirements.

We must acknowledge that this is a manifestation of a systemic problem and not an isolated incident. We must use this opportunity to overhaul our system and examine some of the basic premises on which this whole Institute is being run. Otherwise, we would be complicit in the colossal injustice being done to the weakest and poorest sections of the community that is the service base of the Institute. If we believe that IITK belongs to all of us then we as a community must start taking responsibility. Clearly the administration by itself is either incapable or unwilling to deal with the situation. Let us engage in a public discussion where the entire community participates and comes up with viable ways to bring sanity and humanity back to the campus.

More Deaths at IITK?

I got this mail from the campus, is there any end to this?
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Dear Friends,

Even as we are still reeling from the death of a child because of lack of a health-care policy in our Institute we are faced with the death of another contract worker in the campus. Mr Udayvir Yadav was electrocuted and died on 30th of August while working at the construction site of the
Hall IX building. Like the earlier incident, we came to know of this quite by chance, when the elder brother of the deceased, Mr Ramjit Yadav, who is an SIS guard posted in the campus, was directed to talk to the Minimun Wages Monitoring Volunteer group.

This time too the authorities have chosen not to report the incident anywhere - not to the community, not to the police, nor any other official forum. The incident raises several serious issues regarding the contracting practices of the Institute and the working conditions of the contract workers, but before that a brief description of what happened. Mr Udayvir Yadav, was polishing stone in Hall IX when the machine he was working with became live giving him a massive electric shock due to which he died. Udayvir was 24 years old and is survived by his wife and two children aged 6 months and 3 years. The death probably occurred because of the crude and extremely unsafe method used to draw electricity - without any safety tripping device. The Institute does not insist on or monitor the safety practices that must be followed for construction and other maintenance work on campus.

What is even more shocking is what happened after this fatal accident. The construction of Hall IX has been contracted to a contractor named M/s Raitani who in turn has sub-contracted the entire work to several petty contractors. The immediate response of the employees of M/s
Raitani was to hush up the entire incident. They took the body to a nearby nursing home where he was declared brought dead. After that the contractor's men tried to persuade the co-workers to take the body away immediately to the native village of the deceased in Banda. They even
advised them to not mention that death had occurred due to electrocution but instead asked them to say that he had died of a heart attack. When the co-workers tried to get the body back to the work site they were prevented from doing so by the SIS guards at the gate, on orders from their higher ups. Subsequently, when the workers went to the police station to file an FIR they found the contractor's men had preceded them there. There is also fear that the contractor's men were trying to influence the post mortem report as they were reported to be present in the hospital both before and much after the body was handed over to the hospital for the autopsy. The family has been contacted multiple times by the contractor's men to work out some kind of a settlement - they do not want the family to make any complaints and would want them to settle the whole matter by taking some money. The family and the co-workers fear that the whole incident may be passed of as merely a case of 'heart failure'. They are also worried that proper compensation will not be given and Mr. Yadav s young wife and two children will be left witout adequate support.

In this whole episode the complete silence of the Institute to own up its responsibilities and actively attempt to address the whole issue may end up in letting the contractor get away scot free. When a person dies at work at an institute construction site should not the institute take
up responsibility and ensure that proper procedures are followed? We have conducted an enquiry into the matter and the report is being submitted by the MWMC Chairperson to the Institute. We have made the following recommendations:

- A proper Institute level enquiry into the whole incident.
- Implementation of safe work practices in the campus.
- A group insurance policy to cover all work related mishaps in the campus.
- Emergency first aid and medical support availability close to the work
place.
- All contractual workers to be given employment cards so that Institute
knows at all times who is working on contract for the Institute.
- Immediate compensation (as per law) to the family of Mr Udayvir Yadav

Two deaths in two weeks (possibly three we have been unable to verify the third one since the body was immediately removed), two lives unnecessarily lost, how many more deaths do we need before waking up to our responsibilities? In the midst of the deluge of national and international interest in what is happening in our 'Institute of Excellence' is it not time for us to put our house in order?