HCL Tech campus recruits to hold hunger strike on weekend

Students were recruited in 2012, but have not received proper joining date as yet

Failing to get a ‘firm commitment’ from the company regarding their date of joining, engineering students who were committed job offers by HCL Technologies during the campus recruitment drive last year, are planning to hold one-day hunger strike in Bangalore this Saturday.

In a statement issued on Thursday, the campus recruits of the 2012 batch said they have decided to stage one day hunger strike since their peaceful protests in front of the company’s offices across India for the last two weeks, have not yielded any result.

“Most of us have done our engineering course with the support of educational loans of approximately Rs 5 lakh. The EMI for repayment is around Rs 10,000/- which we have to start repaying soon. So it is painful to see that HCL goes on with recruiting new set of people while our future is kept at stake,” the statement says.

According to these campus recruits, HCL Technlogies had given letter of intent (LoI) to about 8,500 freshers belonging to various campuses across the country of which only a small portion have joined the company so far. Around 6,500 recruits have been waiting for a firm commitment from the company on the date of joining for the last eight months.

“Rather than honouring their offer they kept engaged us in various ways keeping alive our hopes,” the statement says.
However, in an earlier interview to Business Standard, a senior official of the company said that the campus recruits would be informed about the joining date by August 2013.

 “The delay has been due to the changing business requirements. Our business plan gets over in June and after that, we will have a firm visibility and hence, (we) have told the students that by August, we will give them a definite time,” said Nitin Pande, vice-president, HCL Tech.