Multiple missives fell on deaf ears

COIMBATORE: Multiple communications from the Union Ministry of Human Resource Development to the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras to rollback its illegal decision to offer fina­ncial largesse to its retiring employees have had lit­tle effect so far. For example, on October 1, 2010, Vibha Puri Das, Secretary, Department of Higher Education in the HRD Ministry, wrote to IIT-M Director M S Ananth instructing him to “reverse at once” his decision to allow 249 employees to swit­ch-over from the Contributory Provident Fund cum Gratuity Scheme (CPFG) to the more lucrative General Provident Fund cum Family Pension Scheme (GPF) from April 1 that year.In fact, between September 16, 2009 and October 1, 2010, the ministry sent several missives to the institute on the subject and waited in vain for a response. In one of these letters, HRD Additional Secretary Ashok Thakur observed: “We are immensely concerned that an institute of national importance like IIT Madras has not taken action on the audit paras concerning the institute.” Yet there was no response. A frustrated Thakur then resorted to the extreme step of making the release of non-Plan grants to the institute contingent on the receipt of a compliance report from it.Finally, in mid-February this year, Ananth broke his silence and wrote to Thakur seeking funds.Ananth in his letter urged Thakur to “urgently release approximately Rs 50 crore” towards non-Plan grants, as even salaries and scholarships to the tune of Rs 15 crore remained unpaid.In that letter, he made a passing reference to the audit objections on the switchover from CPFG to GPF.And added, “we have already stopped such a conversion since November 2010.” However, he sought time to file a comprehensive compliance report on the grounds that the institute had received “an appeal from one of our faculty members for a legal opinion in this matter, which we are processing currently.” While IIT-M waits for the legal opinion, retired employees continue to draw huge sums as monthly pension from the government’s coffers, which they are not entitled to, as per an irreversible option exercised out of their own free will two decades ago.