Jadavpur University has constituted a committee to reallocate students in the university’s hostels so a separate hostel can be created for first-year students in keeping with a UGC directive issued in 2009.
JU’s officiating VC Buddhadeb Sau said in a communication to the university’s dean of engineering Saswati Majumdar: “Under the current crucial situation, we are to constitute a committee to reallocate all the hostel boarders of the university to facilitate (the segregation) first-year students of the academic year 2023-24 as per the UGC guidelines. I shall remain grateful if you can kindly act as the chairperson of the said committee”.
A first-year student of the university was allegedly killed in the university’s main hostel in August by seniors who lived in the same block.
Many on the campus have said that had the first-year undergraduate students been housed in a separate hostel in keeping with the UGC’s guidelines, the seventeen-year-old boy would have been alive.
The “UGC regulation on curbing the menace of ragging in higher educational institutions, 2009”, says: “Freshers shall be lodged, as far as may be, in a separate hostel block, and where such facilities are not available, the institution shall ensure that access of seniors to accommodation allotted to freshers is strictly monitored by wardens, security guards and other staff of the institution....”
In a meeting of the students’ welfare board held days after the death, it was decided that the first-year students who were residents of the main hostel would be permanently shifted to the New Boys’ Hostel and JPJU quarters.
The New Boys’ Hostel is now occupied by second and third-year students.
Anushtup Chakrabarti, a member of the students welfare board said, the latest resolution was approved in a meeting which was not attended by any member of the board.