#MeToo: Teach For India Sends Three Staff Members On Leave After Over A Dozen Women Allege Sexual Harassment
The accusers include current and former interns and fellows, who have accused their managers sexual harassment.
Note: This story previously mentioned Kapil Dawda. However, we have been informed that the Internal Complaints Committee constituted by the organisation, probed the matter and after the completion of the inquiry, the Committee concluded that allegations made against him were found to be inconclusive. His name has since been removed from the story.
Teach for India (TFI), a non-profit organisation, sent three of its staff members on leave on Monday, after several women accused them of sexual harassment during India’s #MeTo campaign.
According to a Scroll report, the accusers, which include current and former interns and fellows, have accused their managers of bullying, passing sexually-coloured comments at women and even “inappropriate touching” at times.
The majority of the organisation’s fellows and programme managers are in their 20s, and over 65% are women.
Activist and webcomic artist Rachita Taneja, who is not associated with the organisation, shared stories of two anonymous women on her Instagram on October 9. Taneja then started collating complaints of other women working with Teach for India.
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Between October 13 and October 17, 16 women shared their experiences of sexual harassment with Taneja. Several other women who were witness to harassments also came forward, reported Scroll.
On October 13, the company’s co-founder and chief executive officer Shaheen Mistri wrote to the staff requesting them not to air their grievances publicly. She wrote, “It is not helpful…to respond publicly…as the facts in the cases have not yet been examined. Doing this runs the very significant risk of damaging the lives and reputations of people involved in the cases, and the credibility and integrity of Teach for India as an organisation.”
Speaking to Scroll on Thursday, Mistri said that the organisation is investigating all the allegations. “When general issues arise that do not constitute gross misconduct, we err on the side of giving people chances,” she said. “This is a stance we want to introspect on given some of what we understood seems to be graver in substance than anything we were aware of.”
Filmmaker Poulomi Roy was the first to share her experiences on her Twitter account. When Roy was 18, she interned with TFI’s Mumbai chapter for six weeks in November-December 2014. It was a compulsory internship as a student of Symbiosis Centre for Media and Mass Communication.
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“(My superior) sexually and mentally harassed me for a month. He would touch me inappropriately during class. He [would] dig his elbow into my chest while showing me something on his laptop. He would come close enough to place his thigh between my legs when we were sitting.”
Symbiosis doesn’t care. I was 18 when I was sexually harassed at my first work place and the college ended up cancelling my next internship and burying the whole thing. So really @SCMCPune you want to have dialogues with your students? How about you start with protecting them.
— Poulomi Roy (@heauxbaton) October 7, 2018
Roy alleges that she was even unfairly punished by her superior. His report on her work during the internship landed her in trouble. “He said I slept in class, constantly used my phone, was late to work and that I skipped work a lot – all of them were fake,” she alleged. “My college cancelled my next internship. They made me attend remedial classes all summer as punishment and failed me in the projects – our internships make up 60% of the grade.”
Another survivor, a Pune fellow, told Scroll.in about the harassment she faced a few years ago at the hands of the programme manager, Sachin Paranjape. He is now a Senior Programme Manager with Central Square Foundation.
The survivor narrated that Paranjape was already called ‘the playboy’ when she had joined TFI. Paranjape had “intimidating body language”, she said, he “screamed” at her when she asked to reschedule a “class observation”, and called “at inappropriate hours under the pretext of giving feedback”.
“He would also keep asking me inappropriate questions like do I have a boyfriend, why don’t I act more friendly, and if there is a problem with me that I can’t be friendly… Then the inappropriate touching started. A brush of hand here, a hand around the shoulder there. I still recall I would ensure I would show my discomfort. But the inappropriate touching never stopped,” she added.
A current employee at TFI also complained of sexist comments and behaviour from Abhimanyu Sarkar, City Director, Pune.
“I have seen Abhimanyu less than a dozen times, and he has said weird stuff every time. He stared, made random sexual remarks and said sexist things constantly reminding women of how little they are capable of,” the woman said.
Several women alleged that Sarkar has been making them “uncomfortable” since 2011.
Reportedly, Sachin Paranjape has been sent on “leave of absence” till the time an internal inquiry is completed. The third person sent on leave remains unidentified.