Patna, April 6: Residential students of National Institute of Technology Patna, who are already facing shortage of drinking water, found a lizard inside the water cooler of a hostel mess this morning.
The NIT hostels are named after Bihar's rivers - Sone (A & B) and Kosi for the boys, and Ganga and Bagmati for girls. The students have been living at the two Sone hostel blocks without safe drinking water for more than a month and alleged that the administration has turned a blind eye to their problems.
After today's incident at Sone A they decided to inform journalists to highlight their woes through the media.
Students at Sone A claimed of the seven water coolers installed for the roughly 300 boarders, only two are functional. One cooler is on the second floor and the other at the mess on the ground floor.
"We are suffering from drinking water scarcity for almost a month," said Shubham, a third-year student at Sone A. "One of the boarders noticed a lizard swimming in the cooler when he went to fetch water. We are afraid what would happen if some day we find a dead insect or something like that inside the coolers."
He added that most of the students have to go to the hostel mess in the morning to collect water as the second-floor cooler is crowded from early morning. Many have to compensate with water filled from the institute while returning from classes.
"We have come to know about problems of the students," said N.S. Maurya, chairman of NIT's hostel management committee. "Soon, new RO water purifiers will be installed in the hostel blocks."
Another student, speaking on condition of anonymity, said: "Apart from water woes at the hostel, frequent power cuts are making it troublesome for us. It is only April and if this drinking water problem is not solved at the earliest, we would be left with no other option but to stage demonstrations against the institute administration."
The three-floor Sone A has 120 rooms for 300 students. Apart from the five hostels, the NIT administration has rented three flats in Kurji for girls.
NIT Patna has been ranked 87th in the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) of the best engineering colleges in country while it is ranked 21 among the country's 30 NITs.
