Blast From the Past: Feeding Filthy!

The following article is an interview of the 2014 Mess Secretary, Ramesh Singh.

By: Aditya Singh

Email: aditya.singh@iitgn.ac.in

“It’s quite ironic. There’s nothing written in the IITGn contract about food served on festive occasions. So the caterer spends out of his own pocket to provide special food. The last time he spent some Rs 60,000 all out of goodwill. And a few days later we fined him Rs 37000 for contract violation. “

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During the summers the kitchen is hell. IITGn kitchen designed is for 350 students and now serves some 900. There is steam and smoke everywhere. Things are made worse by the Ahmedabad weather. The last statement is a general truism. But put all the ingredients together: the small kitchen, lack of ventilator mechanisms, heat from the cookers, heat from the sun, and heat from the students, and put into this situation a middle-aged man with a nervous heart for a chef and you’ve created drama.

“If you walk through the kitchen, you enter dry and you exit cooked. It’s impossible to last over 15 days as a chef. So they have to rotate their employees to serve our mess every fortnight”

“Because they fall ill?”

“They have to be sent away to recover. The last one ran away.”

The mess employees, the cleaners, and the cooks are on contract for a few thousand a month but may leave without notice if they find better pastures. And that happens often, and often during summers.

Ramesh’s duties as the Mess Secretary began at the end of April 2014.

“I had to stay back for the SRIP internship business. So I ate in the mess. I noticed that they’d change the menu, or that some items were missing, and this happened many times.”

The summer is when the mess makes a bit of a financial loss, says Ramesh. It operates on a paid basis. Since the number of students is very low, and a minimum quantity of food is demanded of them, they cannot make a profit.

“I don’t drink milk, maybe five glasses during my entire stay college life, but there were complaints about the watery quality of the served milk. In fact, it was one of the biggest complaints then.”

Much of the mischief the mess caterer does comes straight out of the desire to cut their losses during the summer. And once they see that they can get away with mixing unlimited water with milk, and not serving the required dish on a particular day, it probably emboldens them to do it the rest of the year.

When the semester began, the complaints about mess food began pouring in.

Ramesh got to work immediately.

The complaint register was the first source of information. Not acting on the complaint book was a source of fine according to the Caterer- IITGn contract. In fact, the one student who reported that he had to wait for 20 minutes in line for milk was eventually directly responsible for a few thousand rupees of the total fine.

“So they took to changing the complaint register itself. They doctored the complaints where possible. Fortunately, feedback alteration carries a fine itself”

Next came the meetings with the manager, asking him to improve the quality of the food, making him go through the complaint register, warning him of the consequences. “He listened to us carefully. He would assure us that all our points have been noted, and that next time there would be no complaints. He appeared very cooperative and friendly. But nothing changed. Same complaints. Same problems. Same assurance from him the next meeting.” Ramesh paused.” Yes, that was frustrating.”

“There was one meeting with the general manager and another manager who was an IIM Ahmedabad graduate. When he asked me how I was enjoying the food, I told him it was bakwas. He didn’t like it.”

After one such meeting, the general manager got up, invited the committee to follow him to the kitchen, gathered all the ingredients, and began making a pakoda - no euphemism. He was quick and thorough. “The pakodas were awesome.” He then gave his word that the pakodas would always taste like this for the rest of the year. He instructed the manager below him to ‘keep his word’. And he did. Ramesh says that the pakodas indeed did taste much better after that.

“But none of the other items improved.”

So we decided to raid the kitchens. Ramesh found 17 cans of oil, all of the wrong brand, in violation of the contract. “Food quality depends on the brand. Many brands were switched to cheaper ones, for cost-cutting. Like rice. Students can sense the cheap rice quality when served. When we confronted the mess manager, he said that the brand had run out, and this was emergency rice. And contract violation due to ‘rice emergency’ happened a lot.” And some items, like fruits, were simply not stocked. The caterer had reasons of course. The shipping was delayed, or the tender suppliers had bungled, or the stocks were not available in the market. “There was nothing they couldn’t explain. This could go on forever.”

It’s normal practice in messes to add a few liters of water to aid with the boiling of the milk. “I can accept that. But our mess changed the practice. They added a few liters of milk to the water.”

Ramesh made the caterer return the 17 cans of the cheap brand oil that was found in the stores. “After that, they began storing oil in simple containers, so it would become impossible to know where they brought it from. They told us they brought the oil, put it in these containers, and returned the original brand containers. Or they’d keep cheap oil in the container of an expensive brand.” Later in the month, two MSc students shopping at DMart saw a mess employee buy a big container of a local oil brand, and alerted the members of the mess committee.

“It can never be proved whether the cheap oil at DMart was purchased for the mess or for personal use. But our trust levels were hitting rock bottom. By the way, changing brand quality has unlimited fine, according to contract”

The mess committee was most upset with the attitude to complaints.

“We showed them the complaint register and demanded an explanation for the uncooked food. He would bring in the chef, and scold him in front of us. The chef just stood there, silently shaking. Then he was sent away. He literally stole our thunder.” Ramesh demanded that the management take responsibility and not pass it on to its employees.

“He didn’t take us seriously. In fact, when we told the general manager that he should change the manager under him or we would fine him, the general manager responded that its possible to bring in a new manager, but the new one might turn out to be worse than the current one, so it’s best to drop the matter. There was some uncomfortable silence after that.”

All this while Ramesh and the Mess Committee had been gathering evidence of malpractice. Several months' worth of contract violations were being meticulously documented since the summer of 2014. The committee met Prof Atul Bhargav who asked them to take the necessary actions to prevent further violation. A few days later, on the 14th of August, the Caterer was fined Rs 37000, more than half of which was due to unfair changes in brand. “Based on the signed contract, we calculated the cost of the products that they should have served and compared it with what they were serving.” This was followed by a written threat that if they didn’t improve the quality they would soon lose the contract with IITGN.

“It worked. The owner, he sent in his ‘khaas admi’ who was a business development man and asked him to take charge. He discussed the menu with us, quite reasonably I think. Anyway, the cleanliness improved. Milk adulteration stopped. And today when the caterer runs out of brand items, he informs us of it beforehand. So the trust issues have been resolved.”

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Its been a hectic and eventful year for the Mess Committee. Next year there will be two messes, two mess caterers, more students, different infrastructure, and therefore bigger problems. It’s a thankless job, and when the current mess committee retires this year, the only souvenir they’ll have to show for their work is a complaint register and an inbox full of hate mails.