In Service of the Lady

Dear H7-alumni,

A quick update on what the "In Service of The Lady" team has been up to.... and a plea for your help to launch the campaign.

After the enthusiastic email exchange a couple of months back, we formed a 'Core Team' consisting of alumni and on-site H7 folks (Gopi, Warden and student officials). A lot has been accomplished in these two months.

The core-team has been conferencing bi-weekly. Projects were quickly identified in three areas : (1) Infrastructure Improvements: Infrastructure makeovers such as the fountain, garden area and the sports fields, as well as provide the hostel rooms with better facilities. (2) Mess Worker Incentive Fund: An assistance scheme for the mess workers who have so faithfully served all of us over the years.

These projects provide a scheme to establish direct contact between the alumni and the mess workers and current residents of the hostel.

The On-site team has carefully vetted the infrastructure improvement projects and arranged them in the order of priority to have the maximum impact on the hostel's ambiance and environment. Better yet, the team has already received estimates from the contractors to get the projects going as soon as the funds can be raised. The total amount needed for these projects is ~Rs. 12.5 lakhs.

The scheme to provide assistance to the mess workers turned out to be more tricky. A monthly pension scheme would have been unwieldy to manage, plus would result in an open-ended liability that may not be practical to fulfill. We also had to work with the office of the Dean of Resource Management and the IIT-B Alumni Association office to make sure that the money is managed carefully and that the project would not set any undesirable precedence, e.g., unrest among other hostels' mess workers. We are pleased to report that we are past all those hurdles and ready to launch the project. For estimated a corpus of Rs 27.5 lakhs for the mess workers.

The IIT-B Alumni office is also helping out by making their database of H7 alumni available for this project. We have about 1400 names in the registry, and about 1100 of those have email addresses or phone numbers in the database. We need to reach each and every one of these 1100 people in the next few weeks.

Rs 40 lakhs (~$88,888) is not a trivial sum of money, but certainly achievable if we all open up our wallets generously. We need to reach a lot of alumni who are not on this mailing list to make that possible. For that, we need your help.

The most effective way to reach people to raise this money is going to be to reach them personally. We would like to create a "calling tree" and need some volunteers to call ~20 other fellow alumni from their own batch, encourage them to donate generously and record their pledges with the core committee. Hemant Patel and Milind Gokhale will be co-ordinating the activities of volunteers who can start this "calling tree" to raise the funds as well as to encourage others to reach out their fellow alumni. If you would like to join this effort, please contact Hemant Patel immediately at h4p4@yahoo.com.

The core team has taken this project this far. I am confident that the rest of you will now join in to make the whole project a reality. Please join the effort.

Regards,
The Core Team

In Service of the Lady | Infrastructure Improvements | Mess Workers Incentive Fund | Sponsor Your Room