The engineering graduates who have taken on Wipro for altering their campus placement offers won a small battle on Monday when the company said they would get the promised pay.

The 100-odd techies received calls from Wipro’s HR department saying the company had reviewed and revised some of the terms of appointment that had been mailed to them on November 25. But there was no change in the decision to induct them into the company’s BPO unit instead of Wipro Technologies, for which they had been recruited after campus interviews last year.

Some of the techies, most of them software specialists, had met information technology minister Debesh Das in the morning to seek his intervention. The minister was quoted as saying that he would “look into it”.

Das and Wipro officials were unavailable for comment.

The techies were shocked when the HR department informed them last week that they would have to join Wipro BPO and work for 12-18 months for an annual salary of Rs 1.6 lakh each. “It was ridiculous. Our offer letters had mentioned annual packages ranging from Rs 2.7 to Rs 3.25 lakh and postings in Wipro Technologies,” said a recruit.

Wipro said the recruits would be considered for vacancies in Wipro Technologies only after completing their stints in the BPO unit.

Monday’s email said the company would pay the recruits whatever they had been promised during campus placements but on condition that they would work in the BPO unit. “It also said that we would have to sign an employment bond and pay the company Rs 75,000 if we left before 15 months,” said Sayantan Mukherjee, a Bengal Institute of Technology graduate.

Asked why they were against joining Wipro BPO, another recruit said: “I don’t want to answer queries like ‘I have spilled coffee on my keyboard; what do I do?’.”