BENGALURU: Job aspirants, who got offer letters from the L&T company during the final-year of their engineering course, staged a protest outside L&T Infotech office in Whitefield in Bengaluru on Monday.
According to the protesters, in 2015, when they were in the final year, the company had offered jobs to 4,000 students as part of campus placements.
However, even a year after that they did not receive confirmation on the joining details. The candidates had staged a protest in 2015 soon after the completion of the course in front of the company’s office in Chennai.
This goaded the company to conduct assessment tests for all of them in April 2016. After issuing confirmation letters to 2,500 aspirants, the company then sent rejection letters to 1,500. Now, the candidates are protesting against this rejection process by the company.
Speaking to Express, one of the protesters said, “We will continue the agitation at all the four cities and also start hunger strike. As we staged a protest in front of L&T Infotech office at Whitefield in the city on Monday, we will conduct a protest in Mumbai next week. After that we will stage hunger strikes.”
“We all got job offers during the campus placements, during which they conducted three to four rounds to select us. What was the need to conduct an assessment test again? And as per our information, even after the assessment test, they just picked names randomly,” a job aspirant alleged.
This agitation by the job aspirants at L&T is being supported by IT Employees Centre based in Bengaluru. A representative of the Centre told Express, “We have extended our support to these candidates as they got job offers during campus placements. They have remained jobless since they finished their course, which is more than a year now.”
The protesters alleged that none of the company representatives, including its HR manager, had bothered to talk to them. “When we were protesting, they took our photographs and also called the police. But, as we had informed the police a day before the protest and taken their permission, they did not initiate action against us,” he said. “Most of us have been trying to reach the HR manager for a month now, but could not reach them at all,” they explained.
Another protester said, “In March 2016, students received an email to appear for another online assessment. Almost 90 per cent of the students who had appeared for the assessment could not qualify and were sent an email stating that the letter of intent issued earlier to them stood cancelled. There have been no such instances previously in any Indian IT services company, where the recruits were asked to appear for another round of test after campus selection,” a protester said.
“We wasted 18 months in the beginning of our career waiting for the joining date. Now, we demand our jobs immediately and also compensation for the time that we lost,” he said.