Bengaluru: Graduate students living in hostels at Bangalore University resorted to a hunger-strike protest on Monday evening. Students were irate when the hostel lost electricity connection and they were fed half cooked food on Monday night.
Hundreds of hostelites resorted to a hunger strike which they continued through the morning on Tuesday at the campus. They withdrew their strike only after the Vice Chancellor promised to look into all their demands.
Most of them gathered before the administrative block of the university and demanded the vice chancellor and the registrar listen and address their concerns. A good number of police personnel were deputed before the administrative block to maintain law and order.
Their concerns were many – There were no cots available for the strength of students that have been admitted to hostels. “Besides the menace of bedbugs and mosquitoes, there are no streetlights on the kilometer-long pathways leading to our hostels and we feel scared to walk in the dark when we return back from our project works,” said Lekha Mahendran, a first year student pursuing B.Sc in Biological Science. The toilets are not hygienic and there is water problem for our daily chores including availability of drinking water at the hostel and the canteen, she added.
Few post graduates from the PG-2 boys’ hostel complained that they were intimidated by their seniors who were overstaying at the hostel, enrolled into post graduate courses for the second time. “The capacity of the boys’ hostel is 400 students but more than 700 students stay at the hostel facility and the super seniors intimidate the juniors occupying their cots and rooms,” said Shivakumar, a first year student. “We have requested the varsity authorities to install CCTV cameras at the hostel corridors, but that has not been done. If the CCTVs were there, the authorities would know how much of torture we undergo on a daily basis by the so-called super-seniors. The wardens are useless as they come drunk and do not manage the hostel properly, he added.
The vice chancellor and the registrar said they would seek police’s help in ousting the overstaying super seniors from the hostel premise. The VC also accepted a memorandum from the protesting students where they had put up their demands including replacement of present wardens and managers at their hostels in the campus. The VC had no option other than to succumb to their demands and reassured the students that he would look into all their grievances after which the hostelites withdrew their strike.
