WINTER IS COMING: PART II

On October 28th, the General Secretary of Hostel Affairs (GSHA) sent an email regarding the vacation of rooms for the winter. The email mentioned that all 1st and 2nd year undergraduate students, as well as 1st year postgraduate students from Master’s and Integrated programs, are required to vacate their rooms by November 27/28, 2025. Third-year undergraduate students were given the option to retain their rooms by submitting a retention form in their respective hostels. 

On December 1st, the Hostel 15 Hall Manager emailed a Google Sheet via webmail, which included the list of students granted retention, along with the rooms allocated to them. Upon opening the sheet, the residents found that all undergraduate students were being relocated into triple-occupancy rooms located on the upper floors of the B and C wings. Three students were forced to share a space meant for two, which suggested that one student would have to sleep on the floor. The combined luggage of all three occupants left almost no functional space in the room.

Some students were even allotted rooms just adjacent to theirs, resulting in unnecessary movement. The allocation sheet was updated multiple times over the course of December 1st to 5th, without any official notification to the students. Being asked to pack and move repeatedly constituted a nuisance for the residents. A sophomore told Insight that when she returned to her originally assigned room at 2 a.m., she found that it had been suddenly occupied by other students. She then learned about the new allocation list and had to shift everything at midnight. Another first-year student had to shift 5 times from Hostel 16 to Hostel 15 and back. 

In addition, while filling out retention forms, third-year students were given verbal assurance that if both roommates were availing room retention, they would not be required to change rooms. The residents reached out to the General Secretary of Hostel 15 seeking clarification, particularly questioning why triple sharing was being imposed while the retention charges remained unchanged for other twin-sharing hostels at Rs. 3500. To this, she replied that for queries regarding the number of occupants per room, they should contact the Hostel Coordinating Unit (HCU). 

On December 9th, Insight approached a staff member, M, from the Hall Manager’s office, who has been actively involved in the room allotment process. When asked about triple occupancy, she explained that it was not originally planned but was imposed after E-Cell increased its room demand from 150 to 250 at the last minute. According to her, this left the hostel administration with “no choice” since the order came from higher authorities. However, when Insight sought clarification with the HA (Hostel Affairs) Council, this claim was contradicted.

According to the official procedure, the institute bodies pose a request for rooms to the Associate Dean of Student Affairs (SA), who then may approve and forward them to the HCU. Before allotting rooms to institute bodies, the HCU confirms the status of room availability from the hostels. Hence, the Hall Manager is supposed to provide a quote for the same to the HCU. In conversation with Insight, the GSHA stated that Hall Managers have the authority to limit allocations based on actual room availability and are not required to fulfill the entire demand raised by event organisers for visitors and participants coming from outside. 

On December 10th, Insight raised these concerns with the Hall Manager. While the room shortage was consistently attributed to increased demand from institutional bodies, it was mentioned that HCU had given the orders for triple sharing; however, no supporting documentation was provided. 

The editors from Insight, who were in conversation with the aforementioned individual, were then offered double-occupancy rooms by her, in an attempt to persuade them not to cover the issue and escalate it, rather than being shown the proofs that would justify her claims. This was clearly an instance of unprofessional behaviour, along with an implicit admission of mischief, and an attempt to manipulate the information that reaches the institute’s population, solely to protect the office’s reputation. 

On December 11th, Insight spoke with the HCU Head, who confirmed the information provided by the GSHA. He further stated that no directive was issued instructing Hostel 15 authorities to place institute students in triple occupancy. This was in line with what the HA council had told Insight, and further strengthens the claim that the decision to put institute students in triple occupancy rooms was solely within the discretion of the Hall Manager and her staff.

The aforementioned contradiction also raises questions about why the staff from the Hall Manager’s office would miscommunicate information to Insight, what may have been the incentive driving their decision to directly allocate rooms in triple occupancy, and on what basis they made the decision to prioritise attendees and participants for fests over the institute residents. 

Insight then escalated this issue with the Associate Dean of Student Affairs, who stated that he was not aware of triple occupancy being enforced and that no such order had been issued from his office. He further affirmed that the institute students must be given priority over external occupants, whereas the Hall Manager conceded to even the last-minute demands of institute bodies for rooms. 

The Dean nonetheless assured the editors from Insight that he would try to resolve the issue. On the afternoon of December 13th, the hostel GSec circulated a message on the official WhatsApp group, saying that upon communication with HCU and the HM office, third-year students will be given double occupancy as per availability of rooms, while all other students will be given retention, subject to availability of rooms only (double occupancy not guaranteed). 

In view of being granted double occupancy, some third-year students were then relocated. However, the updated room allocation list had not been communicated to the IBs (Institute Bodies). The experience of a third-year student was as follows: 

“At 1 am in the night, a coordinator from an institute body intruded into my room, ordering me to vacate, and interrogating me as to who had given me permission. When I mentioned that the Hall Manager had granted me access to this room, the coordinators said that the room was booked for their event according to the list that had been shared with them.” 

This incident points toward the sense of entitlement that students from institute bodies have as well as how the Hall Manager did not establish communication with other parties 

An H15 resident also mentioned to Insight that the Hall Manager relocated all the third-year students from her floor, but made an exception exclusively for a manager from an IB and allowed her to retain her original room. 

Amidst all the confusion and chaos that unfolded, the underlying pain point for students was the lack of cooperation on the part of the staff working in the Hall Manager’s office. When Insight conducted a poll on some WhatsApp groups of H15 residents. All the people who participated in the poll acknowledged that they had faced issues while staying in H15, particularly post this semester. In one of the groups, over 80% of these people agreed that the staff sitting in the Hall Manager’s Office was not helpful. The majority of them also concurred that the room allocations done during winter do not follow a systematic procedure.  

Multiple students have reported instances, not specific to the room allocation situation, where the staff member M has been unaccommodating and unhelpful. Insight has received audio recordings and testimonials from students, which serve as evidence of her behaviour. 

A fresher, participating in Inter-IIT, recalled, “I wanted to get some essentials, including my medicines, from my old room. I asked her if she could lend me the keys to my old room, provided I left my phone and ID card, for a few minutes. She shouted at me and straight away told me to get out of the room.”

A H15 resident told Insight that when she made a phone call to the office to request that her friend collect the keys to her room in her absence, the staff member refused to continue the discussion on the call. Then the student explicitly explained that she was not on campus, but the staff member still refused to cooperate and abruptly ended the call.

The experience of a third-year student was as follows : 

“A staff member barged into my room without knocking and started shouting at me, asking me to vacate the room. I was in the process of doing the same, and she could clearly see that. I kindly told her that I would finish doing so by the evening. She said that if I didn’t vacate it within the next half hour, she would take action. I only asked her why students have to live in triple sharing, but the charges are still the same. She started asking for my name and roll number, and further started raising her voice in an attempt to intimidate me. When I did not answer, she started asking for my name from my roommate and said that a fine of Rs. 5000 would be imposed on both of us.” 

While delays by some students in vacating rooms did add to logistical strains, this does not justify the hostile and intimidating methods employed by the hall office staff. The policy of imposing fines is being misused as a means to threaten students, rather than being treated as an objective penalty for encouraging compliance with rules. In addition, when Insight officially spoke to M, she offered to remove the fines completely. This incident further highlights the arbitrary nature of power. 

First time? 

The events at Hostel 15 reflect a recurring pattern observed every winter across hostels that provide accommodation to external students for competitions and events. In December 2023, Insight published an article titled ‘Winter is Coming’, documenting the confusion and inconveniences the students had to face due to mismanagement within the room allocation system across hostels. 

[Read the article here: https://insightiitb.org/winter-is-coming/] 

Now, the situation has worsened even further. Institute bodies feel entitled to raise demands for rooms at the last moment. There have been instances where students from the institute bodies have been seen directly negotiating with Hall Managers for rooms, which is against the rules, since the official intermediary for room booking requests is the Dean SA, as mentioned previously. It is a fundamental issue if external attendees and participants are being given more priority than institute students, who train and prepare to represent the institute in inter-IIT meets and technical competitions, and work on projects to contribute to the institute’s research output. 

The recent occurrences at H15 also reveal how the Hall Office staff has been manipulating rules to their benefit.  They made decisions on their own and exploited information asymmetry when asked to justify them. In such situations, it is the responsibility of the student representatives to advocate for the hostel residents and critically analyse the decisions made by the Hall Manager before they are implemented. However, the H15 council was superficially involved instead of actively intervening. Moreover, the council was ineffective in establishing proper communication with the students, which in turn resulted in lower cooperation from the latter. In the aforementioned poll conducted by Insight on H15 WhatsApp groups, more than 50% of respondents reported feeling that the H15 council had been unresponsive to their attempts to reach out.

There were multiple instances when the General Secretary and the Warden Nominee were unresponsive to queries on the designated WhatsApp groups. In the past, when students posted numerous queries on one of the groups, the council members changed its settings so that only admins could post messages there. Some students also mentioned to Insight that when they reached out to the General Secretary via personal chat on WhatsApp, they did not receive any reply. Furthermore, instead of communicating students’ grievances to the administration, they just asked the students to reach out to the HCU themselves.

As intermediaries between students and hostel authorities, student representatives are expected to mediate during such crises, so students don’t have to convey a hostel-level issue to the Associate Dean SA personally. When Insight reached out to the General Secretary for her perspective on this situation, she stated that she had resigned from the council a few weeks prior. Insight could not independently verify the authenticity of this claim. She also stated that she perceived the council’s behavior in the situation to be professional and neither silent nor unresponsive; however, several students did not share this view. 

This raises questions about both the accountability of the student representatives and the administrative staff in the Hall Manager’s office, as they can manipulate rules at will. It is unjust that the students suffer at the whims and fancies of the self-serving staff at the HM office and an apathetic council. Insight believes that times like these call for a General Body Meeting (GBM), where the elected representative, regardless of their level, should be held answerable to the people who have elected them. This is the only mechanism in place for situations like these, tasked with safeguarding student interests, when the operational structure becomes defunct.