The director of IIEST Shibpur called Metro on Thursday and said the hostels that are in deplorable condition on campus will be repaired soon.

The director also said that the repairs got delayed because the students were not on campus during vacation and had locked their rooms.

V.M.S.R. Murthy, the director, said hostels 15 and 16, whose pictures had been posted on LinkedIn by the elder sister of an IIEST student on Tuesday, triggering anguish among many, are among 10 hostels that could not be immediately repaired as the students locked their rooms and went home.

“They will be repaired immediately. Work is underway. The students will soon be shifted elsewhere so the repair work can be undertaken. I don’t want any student to suffer because of the poor condition of the hostel,” said Murthy.

He said that the institute was planning to throw open a new hostel on the campus by mid-September that can accommodate 1,000 students.

The LinkedIn post, which tagged the institute’s director and the Union education ministry, shows crumbling walls and ceilings, water leaking throughout corridors, and trash-filled hallways.

The director said on Thursday: “Twenty hostels were under renovation. Ten of them have been renovated. The remaining ten could not be repaired as the students locked them and went off (on vacation). Hostels 15 and 16 are among the ten. We could not open them because their belongings were still there. So we were waiting for their
return.”

“This is monsoon. We have frequent disruptions. The repair work is being done and will be completed soon,” said the director.

An IIEST professor said they were planning a discussion on the state of the hostels.

“Instances of chunks of concrete coming off the ceiling and missing the students by a few inches have happened several times before the director took over in April 2024. We want the administration to take concrete steps,” he said.

The institute’s joint registrar (academic) Nirmalya Bhattacharyya, also the institute’s public relations officer, sent an email to this newspaper and said: “The photo of the dirty corridor of the hostel published in your newspaper was taken on the day when the passing out batch was leaving and cleaning the rooms of the hostel, new and current students were changing rooms and just put some old, useless things in the corridor. It was all cleaned the next day.”

“Also, kindly note that the picture about the dilapidated room is actually a room that is under repair after it was vacated by the students. The photographs of the hostel corridor and a hostel room actually in use are attached and they are taken recently. These are clean and clear now,” wrote Bhattacharyya.