IIT Kharagpur has decided to call around 500 final-year BTech students to the campus next month because poor Net connectivity at home is preventing them from attending online placement interviews, an official of the institute said.
The technology students gymkhana — the students’ council at the IIT — recently carried out a survey among the 1,200-odd fourth-year students and found that about 42 per cent were facing connectivity problems at home, because of which they were not able to attend placement interviews.
After the students’ body shared the list with the institute, the authorities decided to recall 504 final-year students to the campus.
Dhrubajyoti Sen, the dean of students’ affairs at the IIT, said: “The students will be recalled from November because they are not able to attend placement interviews owing to an unstable network. Connection is getting lost midway through the interviews. The returnees have to be double vaccinated.”
An official of the institute said the final-year students would be using the connectivity facilities on the campus to attend interviews.
“The interview process has begun but the bulk of the interviews will start in November. So, the authorities have decided to bring back the students next month,” he said.
Most of the students who will be returning to the campus are from Rajasthan and north-eastern states and a few districts of Bengal, including Bankura.
Apart from unstable networks, some students have cited power outages at home as one of the problems coming in the way of attending interviews.
The students’ senate of IIEST Shibpur had in late July shared a list of students with the authorities demanding that they be called back to the campus as the students were not in a position to attend placement interviews because of poor Net connectivity at home.
Around 500 students of IIT Kharagpur who were not able to attend online classes because of resource constraints had been called back to the campus in August following a demand from the students’ body.
“The job situation has been worsening over the years. The pandemic has given a blow to an already bad job scene. Students are getting jittery. Many of them are fearing the recruiters would have a poor impression about them if the connection gets lost midway through an interview,” a teacher at the institute said.
In an email sent to the IIT Kharagpur director, V.K. Tewari, in March, the students had written: “As is well known to you we come from all over the country to study at such a prestigious college — many of us belong to remote areas of the country where the lack of Internet connection is an issue. Not only this, recent socio-political protests in various parts of the country have led to lack of Internet connection with the students….”
The second-year students at the IIT, too, are demanding that they be allowed to return to the campus immediately. “They could be brought back from January, subject to prevalence of normalcy,” dean Sen said.
