OITSA – OXFAM India Trust Staff Association – Oxfam has its field officies all over India – to name Hyderabad,Lucknow,Kolkata,Bhubaneswar,Ahmedabad and Bangalore. Since Oxfam has a large number of staff across these State level offices above. Oxfam has its headquarters in Oxford, UK. Since Oxfam has been working since 1942 – has been the top developmental agency and Save the Children UK, Action Aid etc were 1,2,3 in order. The funds to Oxfam comes from public donations and it has hundreds of shops in UK and around where they sell second hand goods- like people also donate clothes, any electrical electronic items any item that public want to donate are sold in these shops.
Oxfam GB -OXFAM Great Britain – has its own staff association and so as many of the countries where Oxfam works have their own staff associations to deal with staff grievances, staff development and any other staff related issues. In India also we have the Association and each regional office elect one representative and all India level secret ballot voting for office bearers like Secretary, Treasurer, Executive Committee members. etc. these meetings take place once or twice in an year in different offices.. At times of need the number of meetings will go up.
Once i was the OITSA Representative of Oxfam Bhubaneswar – i used to conduct staff related meetings before the EC meetings. I have visited almost all offices in India. There were many incidents that staff wanted manaement to resolve and when the fail we used to go for some sort of protests.. so we used to have meetings with management regularly – particularly these have taken place when management wanted to reduce the staff and change the existing systems etc.
The below picture was i think was of Lucknow with all other OITSA E.C.members from other offices. In the picture i can remember some names – Venu from Lucknow, Bhagavan from Kolkata, Murali froom Bhubaneswar – in fact he was the OITSA Secretary that time hence two from Bhubaneswar myself and Murali.
We went around some site seeing places when we had day off. Went for shopping – people were more interested in famous Lucknow chicken sarees.
If I remember well we were staying in Hotel Avadh – lucknow said to be the City of Nawabs – as Avadh was ruled by many Nawabs during 18th and 19th century.
That time when i was talking to the travel agent in the hotel he was explaining about the city etc. and he asked me where i was from – i told him Bhubaneswar, Odisha – unfortunately he doesnt know a state called O -Odisha was existing – he is in travel department 🙂