IIEST Shibpur will have a new hostel that will accommodate around 1,000 students ready by May, said officials.

Accommodation woes have plagued the residential campus for several years now. Many deserving students have chosen other institutes in the absence of basic facilities in the Howrah institution.

The new hostel will be opened to students before the start of the new academic session in July, IIEST director V.M.S.R Murthy said on Thursday.

About a third of the college’s students are now forced to stay as paying guests in accommodations outside the campus owing to the lack of hostel facilities, said a senior IIEST official.

The student strength on the campus is now close to 1,700.

Apart from the hostel, a new six-storeyed building with research facilities and multiple classrooms will be opened by the end of November.

“The absence of the hostel facilities and classrooms in a residential campus was inconveniencing students. We believe with the inauguration of these facilities, the problems would be addressed to a large extent,” the director said.

The Union education ministry had allocated ₹595 crore to develop new hostels and classrooms when Bengal Engineering and Science University (Besu), a state-aided engineering institution, was elevated to a centrally-funded Indian Institute of Engineering Science and Technology (IIEST) in 2014.

But the facilities could not be developed in the past 11 years although the student count kept increasing.

The IIEST teachers’ association on multiple occasions wrote to Murthy’s predecessors about the lack of hostels and classrooms which, the teachers said, was coming in the way of attracting bright students.

In December 2023, the teachers’ association wrote to the chairperson of the institute’s board of governors, Tejaswini Ananth Kumar, to take steps to develop hostels, classrooms and laboratories.

They said bright students were declining to take admission in IIEST because of the lack of facilities and that was affecting the institute’s rankings.

Many former students earlier expressed their concerns over the institute’s slide in national rankings in recent times.

Director Murthy said they have started repairing the hostels where students were getting injured because of chunks of concrete coming off the ceilings.

“There were cases of students getting injured owing to poor infrastructure in the existing hostels. Those are being repaired,” he told Metro.

Along with the chairperson of the board of governors, Murthy met Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan on February 5 to apprise him of the projects that have been undertaken.

“We have also told the minister about developing a master plan for the institute so the infrastructure crisis does not arise in the next 25 years,“ he said.