Recently, the Society for Student Mess Services (SSMS) sent an email announcing a partial refund of mess dues and the reasons behind the reimbursement. The email was followed by the unintentional circulation of the Minutes of Meeting (MoM) of one of the SSMS Governing Council (GC) meetings. In order to offer more clarity on the situation, the English Press Club interviewed the President of the SSMS, Kesava Garikipati, against whom allegations of negligence were raised. The EPC also interviewed another member of the GC, Niranjan Jahagirdar, who had raised a motion of censure for the same, in order to provide some context to the situation.
Summary:
Following the announcement of the immediate shut down of the college campus on March 14 and the subsequent termination of effectively all mess services on the 17th, the SSMS GC’s initial agreement with the Food Service Providers (FSPs) dictated that no payment would be made until the mess services were resumed. However, at the time that this decision was made, the exact duration of the shut-down was unknown. Once it was decided that campus would not be reopening even by July 2020, the FSPs contacted the Executive Committee (ExCom) on May 1, requesting financial aid in the form of an auxiliary payment of one month of the workers’ salaries, despite not offering any services at the time. The ExCom of the SSMS GC consists of the President, the Treasurer, and the Secretary. These communications were made with both the Chief Warden and the Associate Dean, SWD in the loop as well.
This issue was brought before the GC on May 3 via messages put up by Kesava on the SSMS GC WhatsApp group. In the discussions that followed, it was made clear that more than half of the GC members involved in the deliberations, including the Treasurer, Anusha Kumar, were against making any sort of unilateral payment when no service was being offered. However, a few days after that, at the suggestion of the Chief Warden, Kesava decided to make the payment anyway with the terms of the transaction—whether it would be a loan or a one-time payment—still up for debate within the GC.
The debate on the same went on for two days. Although no formal vote was taken on the matter, there was a ‘clear consensus’ among the GC members to offer the financial aid in the form of an ‘interest-free loan’ and not as a ‘one-time payment’. It was at this time that Kesava received the exact figures of the payment. On May 5, he proceeded to share them with the members of the GC on the WhatsApp group, asking them to respond by that night if they wished to raise any objections concerning the payment of that amount. However, in the message mentioned above, Kesava only disclosed the numbers of the final total and did not specify the nature and terms of the payment. This led the members of the GC to assume that he was making the payment taking cognisance of the fact that most of them had voted in favour of a loan and not a one-time payment. As the FSP workers are normally paid by the 7th or 8th of every month, it was important to conclude the transaction as soon as possible. Hence, the ExCom proceeded to make the one-time payment of 11.2 lakhs while the terms of the agreement were left undecided for the time being. Again, this fact was not mentioned to the members of the GC at that point.
The discussion of the FSP payments was raised among the ExCom again on the 23rd of May when it was brought to the notice of the Secretary, Garima Dhar, that their accountant was contacted by one of the FSP workers regarding some discrepancies in the payment of their salaries. Following this, the ExCom demanded proof of payment from the FSP managers to check for any discrepancies in the salaries of the employees. According to Kesava, it took several weeks to obtain and process all the required proofs, including the government challans and medical policies for the workers.
In the second half of June, Niranjan was reminded of the FSP payments after an unrelated conversation with a mess manager. When he asked for updates on the terms of the payment, he received a delayed response from the ExCom stating that the conditions of the payments were still left ‘open-ended’. After contacting the SSMS accountant, he found out that the payment was made in the form of a one-time payment and not a loan, as he had believed. Further, he discovered that they had not asked for the proofs of payment by FSPs to their workers to check for any misuse of the credited amount until an issue had arisen in June. Though it is not commonplace to ask for payment records from the FSPs, Niranjan believed that it was necessary for this situation as the payment was not a typical contractual obligation. He later attempted to raise the issue in the GC and AMC WhatsApp groups.
The proofs of payment were finally processed and totalled by the first week of July and they were found to be in order, indicating that any transgressions were internal to the FSP and not something that the SSMS was responsible for. The discussion of the nature of payment was raised again in the GC, where the consensus was to push for the payment to be a loan. This decision with concrete terms was finalised and put in writing on July 10, over two months after the payment was initially made. The FSPs consented to the terms of the contract soon afterwards and agreed to repay the loan within one semester of the resumption of mess services.
On July 14, an official SSMS GC meet was held in which a motion of censure on the grounds of negligence was passed against Kesava and Anusha. The motion condemned the ExCom’s initial act of giving the money as a one-time payment instead of a loan and their lack of communication with the rest of the GC.
A matter of perspective:
Both Kesava and Niranjan agreed that the ExCom had erred in proceeding with the payments without informing the GC regarding its exact nature or getting their consent for the same. They also agreed that the ExCom had acted unprofessionally while collecting proof about how the money was spent by the FSPs. After inconsistencies were reported, the ExCom tried to determine if the money given to the FSPs was used to pay their workers instead of being misappropriated by the management. Kesava agreed that they should have kept the GC informed on their progress.
Kesava and Niranjan differed in their interpretation of whether the payment itself fell under the domain of ‘contractual obligations’, and if the ExCom should have asked for proof initially.
Kesava said, ‘We wanted to speed up the payment for the workers because it was already the 5th or 6th and they had not gotten any money. So that was the reason why we went ahead with this undecided nature of the payment and we went ahead with paying the money.’ The Chief Warden suggested to Kesava that the Institute had paid their campus staff, and that the SSMS should follow suit by paying the FSPs as per their usual practice. According to Kesava, the workers would be ready to ‘comply’ with their requests in the future because of their ‘so-called generous act’. Based on that ‘trust’, they proceeded with the payment. At that time, the SSMS did not know that the Institute was only paying the workers who were showing up for work on campus during lockdown.
Niranjan was of the opinion that the current pandemic and the lockdown had created an unusual situation, and paying for services that were not being provided fell outside the ambit of ‘contractual obligations’. He mentioned that the contract between SSMS and the FSPs contained a clause wherein ‘under extraneous circumstances, both the parties need not fulfil their obligations’. He also added that when he had handled the payments of mess bills during fests, he had to ask for coupons corresponding to the guests who had used the mess facilities as proof before making the payments. He was of the view that this practice had set a precedent for future instances where non-contractual payments needed to be accompanied by a rigorous procedure of verification.
On being asked to comment on the grounds of the motion to censure that was passed in the GC meet, he said, ‘This payment was a special circumstance. What I couldn’t understand was that if you’re going against the overwhelming sentiment of the GC and going against a decision even the treasurer has expressed a negative sentiment to, why did he not have the courtesy to inform the GC immediately after it happened?’
Thus, his actions amounted to negligence on behalf of the ExCom, and that propelled the motion to censure that was raised against Kesava and Anusha.
Conclusion:
While Niranjan agreed that there was negligence on the part of the ExCom and, in particular, Kesava, he asserted that there was absolutely no corruption involved as there were steps taken to return the money to the students. Kesava shared a similar sentiment saying that he should have been more proactive in asking the FSPs for proof that the money given was used to pay their workers’ wages. He said that there was no way any of the money could have been unaccounted for because the workers would have brought it to their notice. He further added that since this situation was new for them, they were unclear about asking for proof from the FSPs. Further, Kesava said he would rather not comment on the allegations of corruption, saying that the confessions put up were either taken down or ‘irrelevant’. Both parties maintained that the claims were completely untrue and baseless.
Both Niranjan and Kesava mentioned that a discussion had taken place in the previous GC meeting regarding the need for a Comptroller Auditor General (CAG) of the SSMS. The proposed role of the CAG would be to monitor every payment made by the president and treasurer and exist independent of the SSMS. Niranjan referred to it as a ‘CRC for the SSMS’. The details of the exact functioning and role of the CAG are still being worked out. Both parties broadly agreed that a check in the powers of the ExCom is necessary, and the CAG will help serve this purpose.
The 260 rupees taken from the GBM was used to pay the FSPs. Now that the money is being charged as a loan, Kesava said that the 260 rupees paid would be returned once campus reopens. He also added that for students graduating this semester, the money has already been returned.
Glossary:
GC: The Governing Council, GC for short, consists of AMC members, mess representatives and the ex-officio members.
FSP: Food Service Provider, FSP for short, refers to the two companies Aditya and Blue Chip Hospitality (BCH) that are contractually bound to the SSMS to provide certain mess-related services.