IIT Kharagpur has been forced to stagger the arrival of first-year students, who are attending online classes, because of lack of accommodation facilities on the campus, officials at the institute said.
The institute has asked teachers to draw up a list of the “genuinely resource-constrained” students from the 2021 batch so they may be brought in at the earliest opportunity.
An IIT official said they wanted to bring only those who genuinely deserved to be brought in as they were facing a shortage of accommodation facilities.
The institute has informed students in an email “there exists some issues regarding accommodation for all students, but we hope to get these sorted out as early as possible”.
The official said 20 to 25 first-year students had written to the dean of students about connectivity problems they were facing at home. The batch has around 1,900 students.
The faculty adviser in each department has been asked to interview the students to find out in detail about the resource constraints they are facing. They have to consider factors like where the students reside and how often the online classes get disrupted in a day because of connectivity, and whether they are in a position to afford data packs. The frequency of power outages in the respective areas also need to be taken into consideration.
While recalling the second-year students in November last year, the institute gave priority to those whose annual income was less than Rs 1 lakh, another official said.
This time the income band won’t be considered, the official said.
The final-year students will be vacating their rooms by the end of May and from then, the institute is planning to bring in students from the 2021 batch.
Now that the pandemic-induced restrictions have been withdrawn, the construction of the hostel for the first-year students has resumed, an IIT Kharagpur official said.
If the hostel is not ready by the time the students arrive, the institute has plans to accommodate them temporarily at paying guest accommodations near the institute, the official said.
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