IITB – Y U NO Care?

Volume 16 – Sumangal

General Apathy of the Institute towards Students**

Abhilash Kulkarni, Alankar Jain, Anshul Avasthi, Atul Gupta, Gunish Handa, Ishaan Rakshit,

Mihir Kulkarni, Pallav Chaudhary, Rishabh Verma, Shreya Sridhar, Sagar Sheth, Sharth Mandan,

Shreerang Javedekar, Tanmay Srivastava and Yash Tambawala

Lazy Monday afternoon. I come to my room post-lunch and am determined to spend the rest of the afternoon studying. Wiping off sweat from my forehead with one hand and removing my bag from my shoulder with the other, I let out a big yawn. The only table in our room is already occupied by my roommate, and I have no other option but to study on my bed. I push my in-dire-need-to-be-washed clothes to one corner of the bed, my bag to another, and then my pillow to a third. Am I done? No. There’s still a laptop, a deodorant, my belt, my water bottle, a mouse (one which a cat won’t eat), my headphones, my wallet, and a dozen other miscellaneous things to be accommodated in the one corner left. With everything staying on the bed itself, I somehow clear a small area for myself to sit: a phenomenon even solid-state chemistry might find difficult to explain. 

Two minutes later, I’m no longer sitting – I’m slouching; my head resting on my hand, which in turn rests on a pile of clothes. The room is stuffy and hot, and the fan above chooses not to rotate fast. But a bed is all I need to feel groggy. When I wake up, I realize that I’d dozed off at some point and that it was night already. I get up and head straight to the mess for dinner. Lunch, sleep, dinner…Hmm. When I return, I make a quick mental note of the number of hours left until the next day’s morning lecture. Woah! Loads of time! But, the moment I sit down to study, my roommate graces the room with his presence and turns on a peppy dance number. His movements are too pronounced for me to ignore, and the dancing vibes are too inviting to be bogged down by an urge to study. My book gets shut, and now we have two people producing seismic vibrations in that tiny cubicle. Numbers swell, decibel levels go up, and the next four hours fly away.

Everybody leaves, and I’m left repenting all the lost time. Roommate dearest, meanwhile, conveniently switches off the one flickering tubelight that we have in our room and lies down. I check the time – already past 11 o’clock. Can’t go to the library. As a last resort, I meekly switch on my table lamp and start studying, fully aware of my roommate’s aversion to any light while sleeping. Seconds later, I hear him growl, “Kitna mugoge? So jao.” I oblige, switch off my table lamp, and go to sleep. I wake up the next day, go to class, come back, have lunch, and….

This pretty much sums up the life of an average student of IIT Bombay. Small, dingy rooms, insufficient tables/chairs, and improper ventilation virtually come as freebies with your admission to IIT Bombay. Courtesy of the periodic rise in the student influx into IITs, rooms which were once supposed to be occupied by just one person have, with time, been split into two. Separated by a wooden partition, each half now houses two people – which boils down to four times as many students living in the same area as compared to what was envisioned while they were being built. With a further 60% hike in student intake being discussed, matters can be expected only to get worse, with the construction of new hostels unlikely to match up in pace. That roommates are not exact clones of each other only makes matters worse.

All of the above forces those who want to study to take shelter in the Institute Library, which is cool, well-illuminated, peaceful, clean, and has ample tables and chairs – all that a student was found wanting in his room. But its being far away from the hostel area robs it of a chance to be the single biggest game-changer for all academic woes of the students, as commuting to and from the library is difficult and wastes a lot of time, thereby acting as deterrents even to those who genuinely wanted to go and study. Also, since it closes at 11 pm, those who prefer to study at night can’t benefit from it. It, in its present state, caters to the needs of a relatively small fraction of students – those who are motivated enough to go that far, study during the day, and prefer studying in solitude rather than through discussions. A lot of problems, though, are expected to get resolved once the study room being constructed on top of the library becomes functional. It shall be fully air-conditioned and open throughout the night.

All these problems add up to wreak havoc in the academic life of the students, and this is not a handwaving claim. We interviewed a few students who’ve either stayed in hostels abroad or in the newer hostels of IITB itself to ascertain if better hostels actually translated to better academics or is their absence just an excuse on our part for not studying. 

Saransh Garg, a student who has been to the National University of Singapore on a semester exchange program, said that they had a huge 24-hour, A/C study room in every hostel at NUS. Also, the rooms at NUS were singly occupied and about 1.5 times as big as an average room at IIT-B. All this made the academic environment there healthier and a lot more fruitful as compared to that here at IIT-B, he observed. Majority of the other universities around the world also fare better in providing accommodation with bigger rooms as well as basic amenities like a table and a chair per student in the room. 

Alankar Jain, a fifth-year student who moved to a single room in H13 from one of the older hostels this year, was visibly elated and said that the difference was huge! He now has more space to work in and has the freedom of choosing when to work and when to switch off the lights and go to sleep. Being the only one in the room allows him to concentrate better. Distractions are way fewer, and more productive work can now be done. Of course, there is a table and a chair which is not to be shared and can be used as per one’s convenience. He strongly feels that one shouldn’t be at any cost made to stir out of his room to study, and the room itself should be good enough for studying in – which he feels is true for his current room. A lot of other seniors who also moved to H13 this year echoed his views.

As per the GSHA, Abhijeet Mukhekar, there’s light at the end of the tunnel with the institute authorities more concerned about student welfare now than ever before. Allotment of single rooms to every third-year student is expected once H16 gets built. Common rooms in each hostel can be expected to get Wi-Fi enabled, replete with charging points as well, by the end of the semester. The mess could then serve as a big, common study room within the hostel. Every hostel room in the institute shall also have two tube lights each by the end of the semester, which would make the room a well-illuminated place to study in. This has already been done in a few hostels. He also said that every hostel is being provided with a printer each. It is to be kept in the hostel computer room and shall be accessible to the students 24 hours via their LDAP ID and Password. 

When asked if study rooms could be made in every hostel either by joining a few of the existing rooms or by building new ones, Abhijeet cited the problem of space crunch and said that it wasn’t feasible. As for the provision of foldable tables in each room, which had been thought of a few years back but never implemented, he opined that it would only be a temporary change which may not be needed once we have new hostels a few years down the line. Everyone would have their own ‘single room’ then, with enough space for even a usual four-legged table to fit in. It seems to be a tall order though, right at the outset. It remains to be seen how much time the gargantuan task of providing everyone a single room would take.

With a lot of ideas in the pipeline as mentioned above, some have already been implemented to make our academic life easier. The LCCs remaining open throughout the night during the exams, for one, has helped a lot of people who were willing to study and deserves special appreciation.

To sum up, the rooms we live in right now are certainly not up to the mark, and it goes a long way in determining the efforts each one of us puts in and the way we fare at academics concomitantly. The issue is dire and should not be trivialized by being called just an excuse for not studying. For the institute to become our second home in practice and not just in speech, it should give us the best of facilities possible to study in.