Bahar Aao: Workers at the Threshold of a Home

The first hands to touch Ashoka University each morning are not those of its students or professors, but of the didis and bhaiyyas who clean, carry, and care. Their labour makes these surroundings livable, yet they remain unseen. Their lives are deemed expendable even as their work forms the pulse of this campus.

For the past three days, housekeeping staff employed through Bluespring, a third-party contractor long used by Ashoka, have been engaged in a sit-in protest outside Gate 1 of Ashoka University. Their demands are simple: fair wages, humane working conditions, dignity, and justice. On the second day of the ongoing protest, a Bluespring representative came to address the workers and told them, point-blank, that their work is “unskilled” and therefore less valuable, not deserving of fairer compensation. The message couldn’t have been clearer: their labour keeps Ashoka running, but is not considered worthy. This contempt is structural. 

Workers’ personal hardships: health crises, caregiving responsibilities and financial struggles are routinely dismissed as irrelevant to the workplace. But this refusal to acknowledge the interdependence of wage work and domestic life sustains a dangerous fiction: that labour can be neatly severed from the life of the labourer. It is a fiction that upholds comfort for some by erasing the burden carried by others. It is easier for institutions to value tasks while erasing the people who perform them. To speak of “services” rather than the lives that make them possible.

The testimonies multiply, and with them the weight of indignity. Women workers have come forward about repeated harassment and assault by their supervisors, yet no justice has been delivered. During moving-in days, workers are forced to haul students’ luggage in the punishing heat: tasks not in their contracts — contracts that themselves are frequently altered or manipulated to the workers’ detriment. “On those hot days,” Mohit* bhaiyya said, “when we are unloading luggage, no one even asks if we are okay. Not once. In what way is this a home?”

These abuses are not new. They are part of a longer history of precarious contracts, withheld wages, sudden dismissals, and the absence of mechanisms for accountability. In 2016, when Professor Rajendran Narayanan tried to create a Workers Welfare Committee that would include workers themselves, the idea was quietly shelved, and he eventually resigned citing ethical reasons (his insistence on workers’ rights among them). In 2018, only after student lobbying did security workers’ twelve-hour shifts finally reduce to eight. In 2020, during the pandemic, dozens of housekeeping staff were coerced into signing resignation letters they could not even read, threatened with the loss of their provident funds if they resisted. Students were forced to raise emergency relief funds when salaries and compensation were withheld. In 2021, a female worker who filed a sexual harassment complaint was threatened by her supervisor, told her ‘izzat’ (respect) was lost, and then denied medical compensation when the ordeal led to a heart attack. 

Each protest is met not with dialogue but with delay, deflection, or suppression. The pattern reveals itself: when workers demand rights, their demands are treated as disruptions, not responsibilities.

The university administration insists on invoking intimacy in the most paradoxical form. In an email sent to the student body on 28th August titled “Important Information Regarding Protests by Outsourced Staff”, the Dean of Student affairs (DSA) Dr. Dheeraj Sanghi continually maintained that the worker’s conditions were out of their hands due to their employment through third-party contractors. They maintained this sanitised stance all the while claiming that the university has “always supported these workers” and considers them part of the "Ashoka family.” A family does not compel its members to work long shifts without adequate pay. Family cannot be family if it erases the people who cook, clean, guard, and nurture within it. This phrasing allows for an insidious form of exploitation dressed entirely in the language of belonging. 

It is not care that drives this language, but control. It distances workers from their contractual rights and instead, frames them as dependents whose loyalty is demanded. The manufactured intimacy in their communication is weaponised to forestall dissent. In truth, what appears to be inclusion on the part of the administration is a mechanism of obedience, reproducing the very hierarchies it claims to soften.

The outrage that fuels the workers’ protests is not only about wages; it is about dignity. It is about the right to have their labour recognised as skilled, valuable, and essential. It is about not being erased from the story of what makes Ashoka possible. Students write essays and professors publish books, but these intellectual contributions could not exist without the physical foundations laid, cleaned, and maintained by the workers. To deny them recognition is to deny the very reality of what makes the university function.

The struggles of Ashoka’s workers force us to confront a question too easily ignored: who gets to belong in this so-called home, and on what terms? If belonging is only granted to those who produce ideas and not to those who sustain the very conditions for those ideas to flourish, then belonging itself has been rigged. A university that claims to nurture critical thinking cannot look away from the critical labour that makes it possible. Until the didis and bhaiyyas are treated not as invisible hands but as rightful members of the community, the word ‘home’ will remain a cruel misnomer. This campus is held up not by stone and steel, but by calloused hands, by care that cannot be contracted out. A home cannot be home if it is built on silence. 

The worth of the workers does not stem from what they do for us, but from who they are with us. A fellow student once told me that after his best friend passed away on campus earlier this year, it was Rajeev* bhaiyya who worked on his floor who checked on him every day. Another student told me about the bond he shared with Aman bhaiyya over their shared love of Hemant Kumar. To erase them is to erase the soul of this place.

But even in the face of cruel indifference, there is still hope. 

This hope has sprung in the cracks of resistance, over the past three days — in protesting laughter shared over cups of chai, in the smiles of children as they draw a flower on your hands using a mehendi cone. The stories of the workers that ever only fallen on deaf ears, but there remains a resilience here that refuses to be erased, a joy that doesn’t diminish in the face of struggle. Despite the hardship —- there is unimaginable hardship — there is a collective spirit that refuses to be broken. This hope is in the simple act of standing together, and it only exists when we listen. When we step outside the narrow boundaries of what we think we know. 

It is time we stop pretending that Ashoka is a family when its members are treated as strangers. It is time to stop mistaking invisibility for gratitude, time to recognise that the university’s true foundation is not its ideals, not its buildings, not its slogans, but the lives of the people who keep its heart beating, whether the Ashoka administration admits it or not.

*Pseudonyms have been used to protect the identity of the protesters.

(Edited by Madiha Tariq and Nikita Bose)