Byju's shuts office; 170 employees approach state govt for salaries
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Thiruvananthapuram: Biju's, the education platform, has closed its branch in Technopark in Kerala's capital city and around 170 employees worked there met State Labour Minister V Sivankutty on Tuesday. They requested the minister to avail their pending salaries and compensation, The News Minute reported.
The minister wrote on his Facebook page that Biju's app employees who worked in the TVM branch met him and submitted their grievances. He said that the state Labour Department would look into the matter and conduct a serious probe.
TNM further reports that Biju's management was forcing employees to resign from Technopark. The news portal cited Technopark Today (TT), a community media platform for workers in the IT hub.
TT said that through an employee welfare organisation (Prathidwani), the mentioned employees are demanding salary arrears for October 2022 and a one-time settlement of salaries for the next three months. Also, earned leave encashment and full settlement of variable pay (as applicable to each employee) from the management," TIE quoted.
Currently worth $22 billion, Byju's sustained a 4,588 crore in the financial year 2021, which was almost times the loss sustained in 2020, Rs 232 crore. Deloitte, which audits Byju's, expressed concerns about its accounts, and this caused the filing of the audited results to be delayed for 18 months, TNM reported.
There are nearly 50,000 employees in Byju's at the moment, and the company is likely to cut 5 per cent of them, that is around 2,500 people in a phased layoff. It is expected to become profitable by FY 23.
The company has been facing allegations against its work ethics. BBC reported in 2021 that behind the sudden rise of Byju's there are stories of customer disputes on refunds and poor services. There are even instances of parents getting debt-ridden and employees being burdened with hectic targets. The company employed sales tactics like "incessant cold calls and sales pitches whose effect was to convince them that their child will be left behind if they don't buy a Byju's product", TNM quoted BBC report. Parents complained that the company's sales agents misled them, and they were ignorant about refunds once the sale was made.
Byju's was founded by Byju Raveendran in 2011 and is the highest-valued ed-tech startup. It was funded by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's Chan Zuckerberg Initiative along with major private equity firms such as Tiger Global and General Atlantic.
