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More Judiciary Education YourTurn Work With Us Campus Voice

What does merit really produce in India? Ask the IIM-B nanny, Payal Tadvi, and Gopal Das

The alleged abuse of a Manipur nanny at an IIM-Bangalore faculty member's house once again shows that actual merit doesn't end with a degree.

On the morning of May 4, on the residential campus of the prestigious Indian Institute of Management Bangalore, N walked out of one faculty apartment and knocked on the door of another. The 23-year-old Kuki woman from Churachandpur, Manipur, said she had not eaten in 24 hours and was in unbearable pain from kidney stones. The household she had just left belonged to Amar Sapra, a professor of Production and Operations Management, and his wife Anshu, who runs a nursery franchise on the same campus.

N had been employed there as a nanny since she was 17. The previous evening, when she had complained of the pain, her employer had allegedly told her she was “doing drama” and locked her in.

This was, by her account, par for the course for the six years she had been with them. Beatings even when she was ill, and no way to reach her family or friends without a phone that had been confiscated. The last time she met them was over a year ago, when she visited home for her father’s funeral. Her employers, she stated in the FIR she later filed, worked her from before dawn to past midnight. For this, her contracted wages were Rs 18,000 a month, of which only Rs 10,000 was paid in April – the shortfall reflected the insufficient number of hours she had put in.

An IIM faculty residence is not — at least by reputation — where this sort of thing is supposed to happen. The IIM is, after all, a wonderful argument that ability and the accident of birth are not correlated. The entrance exam does not know your surname, it does not care about your father’s........

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