Students from IIT Kharagpur have voiced their concerns about the condition of the campus roads and the risk of accidents.
The students surveyed the damaged roads and posted their pictures on the Facebook page of The Scholars’ Avenue, the student-run campus media body of IIT Kharagpur.
The platform posted on its Facebook page on October 31: “The reporters from The Scholars’ Avenue set out to do a survey of the damaged roads on the campus and found that indeed there are many such roads in KGP. It creates quite a trouble for the students who have to use these roads every day, not only causing damage to the cycle tyres but also increasing the chance of an accident.”
“We request the concerned authorities to initiate the work for repairing these roads as soon as possible,” it added.
The students captioned each road picture and rated them on a scale of 1 to 10 (from bad to worse).
“You surely won’t expect such horrible ruptures to prevail for so long in an engineering institution,” read one of the captions.
“Feels like we need some space technology roads here as well,” read another.
During a speech, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said in Parliament that India used “space technology” such as satellite photography and monitoring for mapping and overseeing road construction projects to ensure quality and efficiency.
The phrase soon gained traction on social media, with many using it sarcastically to describe road conditions and infrastructure failures.
IIT Kharagpur director Suman Chakraborty stated that they had floated tenders for road repairs. “The roads will be repaired soon,” Chakraborty said.
The students have posted pictures of the road to Nalanda (an academic complex), the road in front of Gymkhana, and the road connecting the Mother Teresa, Sarojini Naidu Indira Gandhi and the Radhakrishnan (RK) halls of residence.
Roads in front of the Meghnad Saha-Radhakrishnan hall of residence, Madan Mohan Malviya Road and others feature in the post.
With the picture of the road in front of Gymkhana, the students wrote: “Another piece of art. Feels like we need some space technology roads here as well.”
The road has been awarded a rating of 7 out of 10.
About the road to Nalanda, they wrote: “Needs immediate fixing, consider that hundreds of students take this path.”
A teacher said that at a time when the institute is celebrating the platinum jubilee of the IIT, it cannot afford to have such bad roads.
“Poor infrastructure does not augur well for any institute. It creates a negative impression. Hopefully, the IIT administration will act and address the grievances of the students,” said another teacher.