I joined HCL Comnet NOIDA office on June 8 2006 as a Senior Specialist Systems I was having about 7 years experience in my domain lotus notes.
Prior to accepting offer letter I made it very clear to the recruiter of HCL Comnet I will not be willing to work in night shifts and was agreed by the recruiter in return email
Before joining HCL Comnet I also agreed to sign 1 year service agreement and moved to NOIDA from HYDERABAD where I was worked prior to joining HCL Comnet.
On the day that I joined in HCL Comnet I signed a bond and was put on some project that was about to start – due to some resource shortage I was asked to go USA to do a transition of a project from onsite to offshore at Noida office so I left to USA on July 3 2006
Before I leave for USA I was asked to sign one more bond called ‘Overseas training agreement, ‘On a 20 Rs Stamp Paper ) it was mentioned that this bond is valid from the day I return from USA.
I started working on the project and taking care of the day today activities includes solving lotus notes related technical tickets, maintaining servers, and started working on preparing documentation work for the offsite team ( There was only one person left in the USA client company and he too was under great depression as he was also asked to leave as HCL Comnet took the contract for IT support and he was not fully co-operative and which is more common like in this situation)
The main clause of this ‘overseas training bond’ was “Knowledge transfer and customer discussion”
I returned to India in September 2006 after completing the project work successfully with great appreciations and honors from the client company in USA and I found very difficult to work in continuous night shifts and I started asking HCL not to put me on continuous night shifts but they did not listened.
After great pressure I got transferred to Chennai office and again I was put in night and odd evening hours shifts which was started spoiling my health I could not tolerate the health problem and mental depression that I had gone thru due to odd hour shift work and I decided to quit and sent a resignation letter ( I got some offer from other company ) this was exactly a year after I signed the first bond called ‘ service agreement’
I was asked to pay 5 Lakh rupees as training expenses (they claim they given training in USA for me which is a very false statement)
My situation was my resignation letter was accepted by HCL and I had to join the company that offered a job in 2 days and hence I took some personal loan and given to HCL Comnet
Last month only I was able to repay my loan and wanted to proceed with recovering the Bond amount from HCL comnet as in my full and final settlement letter it says they have recovered towards service agreement ( the condition of the service agreement was void as I left the company completing 1 year service)
Now I want an honest opinion from legal experts as how to proceed with recovering the amount from HCL Comnet I m now under medication and using anti-depressant medicines so I cannot travel a lot (the jurisdiction mentioned in the Bond is Delhi)
Will I get the money back or my claim does not contain any legal stand – Is this a criminal case or labour law related or arbitration ( there was a clause in the bond called arbitration) or a civil case and how long It will take
