Rourkela: Rourkela Junior College and Rourkela College, for Plus Two and Plus Three respectively, are facing acute staff and infrastructure shortage.

The institutions, both of which run from the same building, have a combined student strength of over 2,000.

Some of the streams are functioning without any formally sanctioned teacher posts. The science stream of Plus Two has a student strength of 384 for each year.

"The strength went up as in 2014 when the government merged the NAC College with us. But, there is no sanctioned teacher's post for science faculty," said botany faculty Manas Behera, who has come on deployment from SG Women's College. He is the only permanent science faculty.

"For all the subjects, including English and Odia, we have one guest faculty each. Each faculty is allowed 40 classes per month and paid not more than Rs 16,000," said Behera.

A government letter clearly mentions that for science, teaching faculty shall be managed with guest faculty.

"We got some lab facilities from the merger with NAC College. We have no lab demonstrator and attendant. Besides, the size of the laboratories is very small and we only have one biology laboratory," said Behera.

The Plus Two Arts and commerce have a sanctioned strength of 18 teaching staff, but there are only two permanent teachers in Arts and one in commerce.

"We hire guest faculty for almost all subjects in Plus Two and the situation is no better in Plus Three. In commerce, they have only one each permanent faculty for Plus Two and Plus Three. At our philosophy department, we do not have a single teacher though we have honours students. In addition to this, we have no ministerial staff and our college is the nodal centre for all e-admission, and our Plus Two commerce faculty is in charge of that. I teach economics and am also taking care of the accounts department as the accounts officer because we have no staff to handle that. Our sanctioned strength for ministerial staff is 20 but we have seven persons in total," Rabindra Jena, a sanctioned faculty of economics, said.

"The college land does not belong to the college. It belongs to SAIL and because of that, we cannot undertake any construction activity. Our proposed hostel building construction is awaiting approval but we cannot get it as we don't have rights of the land," said principal of the college Subash Chandra Karua.