Vaishali Paatil. Mohaan Nadaar. ASEQ. Stone Circles Production.

17th October 2021

There are plenty of film and TV production companies which fail to pay their bills on time. It’s often because people who run these companies are often somewhat better at the creative end of things than the purely administrative. They usually get their act together at some point however, pay their workers and apologise for the delay etc etc.

But then there are the just plain straightforward exploitative types. Those who paddle around the murky end of our business, those who ritually fail to pay their freelancers on time because hey, why bother once you’ve had the work?

Mohaan Nadaar (also ingloriously featured here) and Vaishali Paatil (also known as Vaishali Karanjkar) are two of those who specialise in the latter kind of thing, with a history of not paying freelancers on time for their work. Complaints there have been many (and still are), but Mohaan and Vaishali sail on regardless, happy to hoover up another set of unwitting workers for whatever grand cinematic triumph they next have in mind.

And that, at the moment, appears to be a “Bollywood horror film” called ASEQ, being made by Vaishali’s company, Stone Circle Production Ltd. Things must be a bit tight for these two at the moment however because, even before putting their vision onto celluloid, they are already trying to sting freelancers by recruiting them for considerably less than the legal minimum; to wit a £1,000 fee for runners for four weeks of 12 hour days.

One would have thought that pretty much everyone has heard of the minimum wage nowadays, but not these two it seems, who are happy to offer rates which clearly don’t even graze the bottom end of a legal day’s pay for a fair day’s work – and seem quite shameless in doing so.

It would be lovely to put these two right in the firmest way possible, namely by mounting a minimum wage claim with HMRC for the work which even they wouldn’t be able to avoid.

So if you have been offered this pay rate for your work on this film (or anything similar) do feel free to get in touch (info@tvwatercooler.org) and we will help you get the pay you should have received. And if you are waiting to be paid by either of these two for any past productions, feel free to get in touch too.

Meanwhile Mohaan Nadaar and Vaishali Paatil: Freelancers beware!