Poor water and electric supply to the hostels at IIT Kharagpur have been troubling students so much that those had emerged as key issues in the students’ body elections that were held on Tuesday.
The Scholars’ Avenue, a media body on the campus, recently posted on its Facebook page: “In many halls, the water shortage is so severe that students had to buy drinking water and go to other halls for their day-to-day activities. Some halls have been facing water shortage issues throughout the semester.”
Candidates vying for the various posts of Technology Students’ Gymkhana, the students’ body, had to assure fellow students during interactions in the run-up to the elections that they would take up the issues with the administration if elected.
The candidates also promised their constituents that they would take up the issue of inadequate accommodation facilities with the administration.
On April 2, on behalf of The Scholars’ Avenue, an interaction was held in an open-air facility with the candidates running for vice-president of the Technology Students’ Gymkhana.
“What are the top two things that you see as a priority if elected as vice-president?” the candidates were asked.
One of the three claimants to the post said he had already mentioned that he would take up the issues of poor water and power supply with the administration “on an urgent basis”.
Another candidate said these two problems were encountered by every student and others on the campus. “If elected as vice-president of the student community, I will be working towards solving this issue,” the candidate had said.
An IIT professor said the problem of inadequate water and electricity had aggravated over the past year, blaming it on the rise in the number of students.
“The students’ intake has risen following the introduction of a quota for financially weak candidates from the general category in 2019. The impact could not be immediately realised as the campus remained shut from March 2020 to February 2022 because of Covid. Once the students started arriving, it emerged that the existing water and electric supply was not enough for the burgeoning number of students,” the teacher said.
“T he administration should have anticipated the crisis and started upgrading the infrastructure during the two-year break.”
IIT Kharagpur had about 12,000 students until 2019. The number now is over 14,000.
Calls and text messages from this newspaper to the IIT Kharagpur director, V.K.Tewari, failed to elicit any response.
An increased intake has also led to accommodation issues because new hostels have not been constructed.
A research scholar said: “Summer has started and we are feeling scared about what is in store for us, given that the facilities have not yet been upgraded. The Wi-Fi service is frequently disrupted, too.”
A candidate vying for the post of vice-president wrote in a segment called “Know Your Candidate” on the Facebook page of The Scholars’Avenue: “There have been accommodation issues that are true for the entirety of the campus. Having talked to members of the construction authority, I have been assured that by the end of July, there will be new halls of residence constructed. I hope that will solve the accommodation issues.”
