IITs ban startups, then invite them to placement meets

Three of the 30 startup companies that had been blacklisted by the All-IITs Placement Committee have got invitation to participate in upcoming campus placements at IITs Delhi, Kanpur, Madras, Kharagpur and Guwahati, just 15 days after they got their snub.

The students’ placement office, IIT Kanpur, invited Medd, a blacklisted health-tech startup, to campus recruitment and summer internship of 2016-17 on August 29.

Similarly, IIT Delhi invited another banned startup, NowFloats Technologies Pvt Ltd, on September 2. HT has copies of these emailed invitations.

The founder of a blacklisted startup , seeking anonymity, confirmed that he was invited to this year’s placements in IITs Madras, Kharagpur and Guwahati. He further said he was in touch with IITs Roorkee and Kanpur on the issue. However, he refused to share copies of the emails, saying, “It seems most IITs are now being rational in choosing to work with startups.”

When contacted AIPC refused to comment on the story , but a senior official told HT on the condition of anonymity that the committee has not received any input from any IIT on inviting ‘blacklisted’ companies.

The All-IITs Placement Committee banned 31 startups on August 25, for reneging on job offers. However, the ban on Crayon Data India Pvt Ltd was revoked later, said panel sources.

Seven of the 30 blacklisted startups have confirmed the panel has not contacted them after the ban. The other banned firms have not answered HT’s emails.

Mera Hunar’s CEO Vinay Dalal alleges the panel was “unfair” in giving big brands like Flipkart, who reneged on job offers, a chance to justify their actions, but not others. “You cannot have two sets of rules.”

“We should have got an official communication on the ban. They should have given us a notice of at least 14 days so we could justify our actions,” says Arpit Kothari, co-founder, Medd.

“It was unfair on the part of the panel to inform the media of the ban. It is like an act of defamation,” he added.

Jasminder Singh Gulati, founder of NowFloats, said, “When you are building a company, you would not want any negative reviews of you.”

Though the panel sent a strong message to the startups that didn’t honour their job offers, the ban seems insignificant.

For instance, CashCare received a job application from a final-year IIT student on August 26, a day after the ban. On September 5, one of the new IIMs invited another banned startup to campus placements this year. HT has copies of these mails.