When Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur was set up in 1959, two villages were uprooted. The farmers were given meagre compensation for the standing crop. No compensation was given for the land to build this institute of national importance. Each family was promised a job but what was not told to them was that one would require specialised skills to get a job at IIT. Some members of these families were, of course, absorbed for menial work. Some washerfolk families were also invited from outside to live on campus to take care of the laundry needs of students, staff and faculty members. One of these men was cajoled by IIT authorities then to forego a regular employment at IIT and instead take up clothes washing work.
IIT Kanpur has an initiative called Innovative Ventures and Technology for Development, a joint collaboration of Government of India and Department for International Development of the Government of UK, which aims to benefit 10 lakhs poor people at the bottom of economic pyramid. Sanitation is one of the areas identified in which social incubation programmes could be taken up. As part of Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, all institutions of higher learning, including IIT Kanpur, were supposed to adopt five villages to help them achieve the open defecation free status. More recently, IIT Kanpur and ICICI Foundation for Inclusive Growth have signed a MoU to work together on a Digital Health Stack project towards advancing and strengthening healthcare. That sanitation is intrinsically associated with human health needs no elaboration. Countries with low availability of decent sanitation facilities are known to have poorer health indices. Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared India open defecation free on 2 October, 2019, five years after the scheme was launched. Who would have guessed that internationally recognized premier institution of technology IIT Kanpur has denied toilets to its 34 washerfolk families belonging to the Scheduled Caste for the last 65 years and still continues to do so? This is a classic case of darkness beneath the lamp. Should IIT Kanpur not be held guilty of denying 34 Dalit families a right to dignified life? A case could be filed under the SC and ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 against IIT Kanpur for this deliberate discrimination against Dalits.
Now the IIT Kanpur administration wants these 34 families to leave the campus as it has installed washing machines in hostels on campus. This is exactly the kind of danger Gandhi has pointed out in Hind Swaraj, his seminal work, where machines will become a threat to employment of human beings. However, foreseeing resistance to this move from various quarters IIT has adopted the well established tactics of making the victim look like an accused who has committed crime. The washerfolk have been accused of expanding their business outside the campus. Is it not a policy of the institute to encourage its professors to collaborate on research and projects with agencies and private corporations outside? Professors and students are lauded if they can launch start-ups. ‘Entrepreneurship’ is otherwise a much admired trait among the IIT communities. But IIT Kanpur wants its Dalit inhabitants to remain content with limited earnings. Washerfolk families have also been accused of indulging in criminal activities like peddling drugs. Now, one just needs to do a survey of India’s elite institutions of higher learning to discover that drug abuse is a problem independent of any washerfolk families living on campus. It is shameful that IIT wants to make washerfolk families scapegoat for a problem it cannot control.
Finally, the washerfolk families, invited by the then Director six decades back, are being accused of illegally encroaching upon IIT land. One estate officer of the Institute in 2018 has even calculated a penalty of Rs. 150 per square meter that the washerfolk are liable to pay for the illegal encroachment. Now, if the descendents of farmers, whose land was forcibly acquired to build more than 1000 acres IIT Kanpur campus, were to appear and demand penalty from IIT Kanpur for encroaching upon their land, would it be considered inappropriate? After all, how has IIT Kanpur benefitted the common people of this country considering that farmers were asked to sacrifice their land for building this institute of national importance? The common citizens of this country are still denied the basic facilities of education, health care, sanitation and housing. Poverty alleviation continues to be an uphill task. Six sanitation workers died of asphyxiation when cleaning septic tanks in Bithoor and Jajmau, two areas of Kanpur, as late as 2022. Why is there no easily available affordable technology to prevent deaths of individuals in sewer lines and septic tanks? Students of IIT Kanpur fill the seats of graduate programmes in universities of the United States and then go on to work productively at the higher end of technology for the multinational corporations, which has benefitted very little the manufacturing sector of this country. Narendra Modi had to dilute the ‘Made in India’ slogan to ‘Make in India’, inviting companies abroad to come with their technology and use our cheap labour for manufacturing. Even that has not taken off in a big way. We continue to be woefully dependent on China for crucial technologies in the area of computers, mobile phones and medicines, among other things. Financial, management and administrative jobs seem to attract IIT students more than technology jobs. The salaries of IIT professors have gone up twenty times since the neoliberal economic policies have been adopted in this country, a period which has seen daily wages increase by only about 5 to 6 times. Thus IIT students and professors have let, the people of this country in general and the farmers of Kanpur in particular, down. The IITs have not fulfilled the objective for which they were set up. So, there would be nothing wrong if the farmers of Kanpur demand a penalty from the IIT and ask it to wind up and maybe relocate its campus to the US as it seems to serve the US more than it does this country. The Indophiles can work for India from anywhere in the world.
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Writer is General Secretary of Socialist Party (India)
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