Startups in India have recently been struck with a wave of consolidation as they’ve found it difficult to raise funds. And due to the same, they had to forego or delay the joining of most of their campus placement offers, leaving the students stranded with no jobs in hand. And now to prevent this from happening again, IITs are planning to boot some 20 odd startups out of this years placement season.
The twelve Indian Institute of Technology(IITs) that were present at the All-IIT Placement Committee meeting held at IIT Kanpur have unanimously decided to take this stringent measure (via ET). It is because many renowned startups had revoked their offers made to graduating students last year.
Also, the coveted institutes are planning to issue warnings to startups and defaulter companies who’ve flouted the placement rules in 3 categories – deferring joining dates, altered salary terms or changed job profiles and completely withdrawing offers.
They’ve added that warning letters will be issued to companies appearing on the list of first two categories, while those on the third would be barred this year. Flipkart, who had partially flouted the terms has been issued a strict warning and is not expected to be blacklisted from the placement season.
Commenting on the same, All-IIT Placement Committee (AIPC) convenor Kaustubha Mohanty added,
Flipkart does not figure in the list of startups that would face a blanket ban as it did not completely withdraw the offers. [While], a ban on Zomato will remain in place for a second year.
The committee decided to chalk up a list of defaulters in about two weeks, as it does not want something like this to be repeated this year. This kind of behaviour won’t be tolerated by any of the IITs, as they believe it tarnishes the established reputation of the biggest tech institutes in the country.
This exercise has been introduced due to big startups like Flipkart deferring joining dates and rescinding campus offers. Zomato had been banned from the placement season last year, due to a spat over day-one placement slot which was requested by CEO Deepinder Goel. He had later expressed his frustration about the broken Indian placement system on Twitter.
While, Flipkart had changed the joining dates of most campus recruits from June to December, citing company;s organisational restructuring as the reason. It had stated that,
The decision to defer joining for six months has been taken after due evaluation of all possibilities and keeping in mind timelines to complete organisational restructuring at Flipkart.
Grofers, one of the struggling players on the hyperlocal delivery space, had also recently cut down its work-force by 10 percent, and rolled over on 67 campus offers.
